I, too, was surprised that the VW Foundation allowed The Steersman to go ahead, having resisted it for a very long time. There was a legitimate concern that someone might try to inveigle it into the Sea Symphony. Now that we can hear Martin Yates's excellent realisation (I'm listening to it now), it is so obviously not part of A Sea Symphony that any danger is averted. I'm pleased to have the opportunity to hear it, after so many years of reading about it. Like all early RVW pieces, there is greatness within it, and some of it is lovely. I wasn't expecting a desert island piece, but my life is richer for hearing it.
Similarly with The Future. I had photographed the MS in the British Library, and photographed it, with permission from what was then the VW Charitable Trust. Simon Coombs and I introduced Martin Yates to it over tea at Dorchester Abbey at the EMF, and Martin went on to make it into something. As found, it's a sketchy outline, ending mid-sentence on page 32 of a 32 page MS book; my suspicion is that the sketch was once more complete, and the final pages were lost. There were cuts in the poem leading up to that point, and what further cuts would have been made is a matter for speculation (though you can see where the composer's mind was leading, up to a point). There were some great ideas then, but I was surprised (at the Edinburgh premiere) that Yates had built it up on such a big scale - effectively taking the Sea Symphony as a model. Perhaps the nature of the poem (ideas not so far apart from Whitman) determined a similar evocation of time and space:
As what he sees is, so have his thoughts been.
Whether he wakes,
Where the snowy mountainous pass,
Echoing the screams of the eagles,
Hems in its gorges the bed
Of the new-born clear-flowing stream;
Whether he first sees light
Where the river in gleaming rings
Sluggishly winds through the plain;
Whether in sound of the swallowing sea
As is the world on the banks,
So is the mind of the man.
Again, this is an abandoned work. Vaughan Williams was a composer who constantly moved on. Every major work was a new exploration, and he never returned (except for repeated revision of the original). It is not surprising that, during the long gestation of the Sea Symphony (sketches from 1903) he made the decision that he was going to focus his attention on that, while abandoning a might-have-been alternative based on another poet. His early sketch for Dover Beach was lost, and he was only to realise a setting of Matthew Arnold with An Oxford Elegy in 1949 - though surely inspired by his nocturnal walk with Henry Ley through many of the places named in the poems 35 years or so earlier.
The new realisation of The Future is a single movement of 33 minutes. That's rather long - I'm not sure that VW completed any movement quite as long as that; even Bruckner would surely have been proud. Just checking my collection, I see that Havergal Brian passed the 35 minute mark in the penultimate movement of the Gothic Symphony. The Future, however, occasionally sounds like VW at his most magnificent, and the length doesn't matter.
On behalf of Albion Records, I plead guilty to many first recordings of RVW works. Of course that includes the Three Impressions referred to in this thread. We recorded Margery Wentworth, which is emphatically not a missing sixth Tudor Portrait, but a completed movement which I think was for a cycle that was planned and then abandoned - A Garland of Laurels. I can see why RVW moved on - the language of that cycle of Skelton's poems is generally rather courtly, and we could have ended up with something like John Cleese's British Leyland Violin Concerto - four movements, all of them slow, with a two hour tea-break in-between. However, I think that one surviving movement is a gem, just perfect, and I'm pleased to have been responsible for realising it.
That was on the same album as Pan's Anniversary - another completed work, written in a hurry and performed just once, but a fascinating insight into the composer's development in 1905, a formative period, with 'Unknown Region' imminent and the Sea Symphony itself in the melting pot. Neither do I need to apologise for the two Tennyson settings on that album, at least one of which is just gorgeous.
I could go on about past triumphs (and I don't need a lot of persuading to do so), but you really want to talk about a couple of big works from 1937, both only available with full orchestra in recordings from that era. I heard somewhere that VW wrote the Coronation Te Deum for enormous forces so that they had to pay more musicians, but I don't know the origin of that story; it may be scurrilous.
What I do know is that these things cost more money than I can currently manage. Every Albion recording loses money, and hiring the sort of forces required for the Coronation Flourish and the Te Deum is going to cost lots and lots. Now and then, a little serendipity happens, making possible something that might otherwise be very difficult. This one needs quite a lot of serendipity. I promise to keep my eyes open, and if anybody reading this thread decides that the cause is deserving of their financial support, then I am most certainly open to offers.
Musicweb is telling me that I have only 44,620 characters remaining, so I had better stop.
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