Ralph Vaughan Williams: Toward The Unknown Region: Mixed Choir: Vocal Score

20th century English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams is perhaps best known for his symphonies and large-scale choral works however the essence of his music can also be found in his songs. His 1903 House of Life cyclefeatures 6 songs out of which the most famous one is the second Silent Noon. Composed before the rest of the cycle and first published separately this piece in E-flat major for Voice and Piano can easilystand alone. By using the sonnet of renowned 19th century English painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti Williams celebrates the beauty of the English language and advances toward the true 20th century Englishart song. All of the songs in House of Life are written for sonnets from Rossetti?s sonnet-sequence of the same name and thus the continuity of the cycle is enforced both by the music and the lyrics. At the same time thesimilarity given by the strict rules of the Petrarchan sonnet-form emphasises the differences in mood meaning and music between the six songs. Even though the (male) narrator in Silent Noon is optimistic andhopeful some of the variations in the passages suggest the despairing of love in Song 6 (?Love?s Last Gift?) which gives this piece an interesting lyrical atmosphere.

Par VAUGHAN WILLIAMS RALPH. Boldly reimagined and completed by Martin Yates, The Future, a substantial non finito draft of a major choral setting of words by Matthew Arnold, dates from 1908, immediately after Toward the Unknown Region, and in the crucial year of Vaughan Williams’s three-month tutelage with Ravel in Paris. Urgent ecological concerns – strikingly relevant today no less than in the Victorian period of unprecedented industrial expansion – propel the broad sweep of Arnold’s prescient account of mankind’s past and its uncertain hereafter. The prophetic tone draws on similar images of river, estuary and ocean that inspired the finale of A London Symphony. The Future is around 35 minutes’ duration, for solo soprano, chorus and orchestra, and it will without question be seen as an essential link in the evolution of VW’s embracing universal vision of humanity, expressed uniquely for all time in A Sea Symphony. / Date parution : 2023-03-11/ Répertoire / Soprano, SATB et Orchestre

'Quartet In C Minor' is in four movements with a total duration of about 25 minutes. The opening Allegro is similar in style to Dvorak in its lyricism though there is a darker more brooding atmosphere towards the close. It is tempting to detect a hint of folk-song in the theme of the Andantino played by the viola but that may be stretching hindsight too far. The movement has a wistful melancholy that carries over into the following Intermezzo a song-like episode containing some of the most virtuosic writing in the work. The last movement is a theme and six variations with a fugal ending. The theme is ballad-like with a suggestion of 18th-century elegance. Modalitycreeps into the second Adagio variation and there is rhythmic exhilaration in the succeeding Presto. What can be admired in this attractive quartet is its conciseness. This String Quartet was his first major composition of any kind.

Pour Cor Anglais (Ou Flûte Ou Clarinette Ou Alto) Violon Et Violoncelle-Rarely has a musical work been better characterized by its subtitle than Nicolas Bacri’s Lyric Interlude: ‘A Study in Pastoral Style’. When in 2008 the composer received the commission for a piece with English Horn from Cecilia Benner patron of the Chamber Music Society of Detroit he immediately thought of the duo between this instrument and the Oboe that Berlioz in the Symphonie fantastique placed at the beginning of the ‘Scène aux champs’ making suddenly appear a nocturnal country landscape where two shepherds carry on a dialogue on their pipes. First performed in March 2009 atone of the Scarab Club Concerts in Detroit the Lyric Interlude for English Horn Violin and Cello (Op.110a) nonetheless proclaims another tradition: that of British pastoralism illustrated by the music of Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) the 50th anniversary of his death having just been celebrated. This score pays him homage of rare sensitivity: set off by refined counterpoint the undulating lament of the beginning rhythmically supple evokes the waving wheat as does Vaughan Williams in the opening undulation of his Symphony No.3. The lyrical effusion briefly interrupted by a scherzo in 6/8 again pours out making the work evolve towards a slow ecstatic atmosphere close to the last of the English composer’s Three Preludes on Welsh Hymn Tunes. Far from bucolic postcard clichés and servile imitation this Lyric Interlude opens the doors to a realm where pure beauty reigns. The composer also wrote another version of this work for English Horn (or Flute Clarinet or Viola) and Piano Op.110b (AL 30 750)