Customer Reviews

Vaughan Williams: Orchestral Favourites, Vol. 3

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Vaughan Williams was responsible for a great renaissance in English music through the development of a distinctive style based on the melodies of folk songs. You can hear excellent examples here on the Greensleeves Fantasia and the Five Variants on Dives and Lazarus. At first these appear to be almost student exercises: Take a theme and play with it. But the resulting pieces have great beauty and William Boughton's conducting shows more than a deep understanding of the music. The phrasing is sensitive without being sentimental. You'll play each track again and again.

The Tallis Fantasy is based on a very simple hymn tune, but is a remarkable piece. Scored for a double orchestra, the strings play lightly with a tone that evokes a softly playing organ at the distance in a large cathedral. Although many critics instantly recognized the timeless quality of this piece on its first performance at the Three Choirs Festival in 1910, one local paper carried a review that said, in essence, nice enough, but we'll never hear this performed again. Wrong!

The oboe concerto is a well-crafted spirited piece that does well in performance. Maurice Borgue plays enthusiastically. Unfortunately, the solo instrument is so closely miked, you can hear the pads click on the ebony!

This is an essential CD to own for any serious lover of English classical music.

This recording is highly recommended as an introduction to a composer who wrote some of the most beautiful music ever written. The English String Orchestra gives a completely idiomatic and technically brilliant performance, including a Wasps Overture that leaves the listener breathless. The oboe concerto is a particularly haunting work and is performed brilliantly.

This CD, recorded in 1994, has a selection of works by Vaughn Williams that I would recommend to someone to introduce them to the works of this great composer. The Lark Ascending, The Wasps Overture, Fantsia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, and Fantasia on Greensleeves are all included and these are certainly some of the most popular and accessible of his works. This CD is highly recommended due not only to the selections but the highly technically proficient performances recorded here. These works of Vaughn Williams are lyrical and melodic. They are also ethereal and sometimes give me a sense of floating and yet they are pastoral and evoke countryside, lake and forest. They often evoke the English landscape for me as I listen. These selections give pleasure to the listener. They carry the listener, if you will. There is something extremely grand about music that can lift you, carry you, take you off your feet and into the air. Maybe I overstate but I think listeners will find these selections totally accessible and grand.