Never mind that it is a total scandal that the full score has never before been available in print (and that the vocal score is priced so prohibitively that it would effectively bankrupt any amateur choral society that might be tempted by it) but the quality of the copy is abysmal. What OUP have produced, at an advertised cost of over £100, is a smudgy photocopy of what looks like a battered original rehearsal score from 1951. The only sections of the score in print are those which remained unchanged from the Shepherds of the Delectable Mountains, a copy of the 1924 published score of that episode having been bodily dismembered and interleaved with the later and new material in manuscript (not, thankfully, VW's own handwriting!) and then - even more extraordinarily - passages crossed through and deleted, other extra pages inserted with arrows showing the unfortunate performers where to go next (and not even accurately, at that) and squiggles where the unfortunate copyist has run out of space on the page and had to backtrack to fit in individual vocal lines. Passages excised in this score were subsequently restored by Brabbins (and by Hickox in his recording), so the result does not even reflect current performance practice.
One might have thought that someone at OUP, seeing that they were finally getting round to issuing the full score in print, might have commissioned some impecunious student or other to sit down for eight months and transfer the whole caboodle onto Sibelius so that at least a legible, correct and properly revised score would have been issued - especially for such an exorbitant charge. But then I cannot find that even this ‘full score’ is available for purchase any longer. And listening to the rehearsals for Boult’s recording (just reissued in the VW celebratory box from Warner) makes it clear that even in 1972 performers were having difficulty with the material with which they were forced to play.
So perhaps, when lamenting the lack of performances of VW scores overseas, we should be looking for possible reasons closer to home. If this is the quality of the performing materials from which they are expected to work, it might not be quite so surprising (although nonetheless scandalous).
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