Ralph Vaughan Williams (12 October 1872 – 26 August 1958) was an English composer. His works include operas, ballets, chamber music, secular and religious vocal pieces and orchestral compositions including nine symphonies, written over sixty years. Strongly influenced by Tudor music and English folk-song, his output marked a decisive break in British music from its German-dominated style of the 19th century.

Vaughan Williams was born to a well-to-do family with strong moral views and a progressive social outlook. Throughout his life he sought to be of service to his fellow citizens, and believed in making music as available as possible to everybody. He wrote many works for amateur and student performance. He was musically a late developer, not finding his true voice until his late thirties; his studies in 1907–1908 with the French composer Maurice Ravel helped him clarify the textures of his music and free it from Teutonic influences.

Vaughan Williams is among the best-known British symphonists, noted for his very wide range of moods, from stormy and impassioned to tranquil, from mysterious to exuberant. Among the most familiar of his other concert works are Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis (1910) and The Lark Ascending (1914). His vocal works include hymns, folk-song arrangements and large-scale choral pieces. He wrote eight works for stage performance between 1919 and 1951. Although none of his operas became popular repertoire pieces, his ballet Job: A Masque for Dancing (1930) was successful and has been frequently staged.

Two episodes made notably deep impressions in Vaughan Williams’s personal life. The First World War, in which he served in the army, had a lasting emotional effect. Twenty years later, though in his sixties and devotedly married, he was reinvigorated by a love affair with a much younger woman, who later became his second wife. He went on composing through his seventies and eighties, producing his last symphony months before his death at the age of eighty-five. His works have continued to be a staple of the British concert repertoire, and all his major compositions and many of the minor ones have been recorded.

Here is one of my fantasy concerts.

The Wasps Overture

Oboe Concerto in A minor

Interval – A cuppa methinks

Symphony No. 6

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The Wasps

The Wasps is incidental music composed by the British composer Ralph Vaughan Williams in 1909. It was written for a production of Aristophanes’ The Wasps at Trinity College, Cambridge, and was Vaughan Williams’ first of only three forays into incidental music. A later performance of the work was one of only a small number of performances conducted by Vaughan Williams that was committed to a recording.

It was scored for baritone solo voices, a chorus of tenors and baritones (in two parts each), and orchestra. The complete incidental music is lengthy (about 1 hour and 45 minutes) and is not often performed.

Vaughan Williams later arranged parts of the music into an orchestral suite (about 26 minutes), in five parts:

1. Overture

2. Entr’acte

3. March Past of the Kitchen Utensils

4. Entr’acte

5. Ballet and Final Tableau

The Overture is quite concise (about 10 minutes) and is a popular independent concert piece today. The main theme is pentatonic. There are close to 30 recordings now available of the overture. The March Past of the Kitchen Utensils is also quite charming and sometimes separately performed. The entire orchestral suite is also sometimes performed and recorded.

The year before he wrote The Wasps, Vaughan Williams spent three months in Paris studying orchestration with Maurice Ravel. Although The Wasps may reflect something of Ravel, it is quintessential Vaughan Williams. Except for the opening buzzing, the piece has little to do with wasps or with ancient Greece.

Oboe Concerto in A minor

The Concerto in A minor for Oboe and Strings was written by Ralph Vaughan Williams in 1943–44 for the oboist Léon Goossens, to whom the score is dedicated.

Vaughan Williams began work on the Oboe Concerto in 1943, immediately after completing the Fifth Symphony, with which it shares a great deal. Amongst other things, the concerto began as a revision of a scherzo movement originally intended for the symphony. The concerto was to have been premiered at a Proms concert on 5 July 1944, but due to the threat of V1 rocket raids on London the Proms season was curtailed. The piece was first played in Liverpool instead, on 30 September 1944 in a concert by the Liverpool Philharmonic, conducted by Malcolm Sargent, that also included the Oboe Concerto by the soloist’s brother, Eugène Goossens.

This pastoral piece is divided into three movements:

1. Rondo Pastorale (Allegro moderato)

2. Minuet and Musette (Allegro moderato)

3. Scherzo (Presto – Doppio più lento – Lento – Presto)

Symphony No. 6

Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Symphony in E minor, published as Symphony No. 6, was composed in 1944–47, during and immediately after World War II and revised in 1950. Dedicated to Michael Mullinar, it was first performed, in its original version, by Sir Adrian Boult and the BBC Symphony Orchestra on 21 April 1948. Within a year it had received some 100 performances, including the U.S. premiere by the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Serge Koussevitzky on 7 August 1948. Leopold Stokowski gave the first New York performances the following January with the New York Philharmonic and immediately recorded it, declaring that “this is music that will take its place with the greatest creations of the masters.” However, Vaughan Williams, very nervous about this symphony, threatened several times to tear up the draft. At the same time, his programme note for the first performance took a defiantly flippant tone.

Perhaps the composer never intended the symphony to be programmatic, but it was inevitable that his post-war audience should associate its disturbing and often violent character with the detonation of the atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In response to these questions, he is widely quoted as having said, “It never seems to occur to people that a man might just want to write a piece of music”. In connection with the last movement, the composer did eventually suggest that a quotation from Act IV of Shakespeare’s The Tempest comes close to the music’s meaning: “We are such stuff / As dreams are made on; and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep.”

The Symphony is noteworthy for its unusually discordant harmonic language, reminiscent in approach if not in technique of his Symphony No. 4 from over a decade earlier, and for its inclusion of a tenor saxophone among the woodwinds. In several respects this symphony marks the beginning of Vaughan Williams’s experiments with orchestration that so characterise his late music.

The symphony is in four linked movements (i.e. one movement leads straight into the next, with no pause between them), and includes a number of ideas that return in various guises throughout the symphony, for example the use of simultaneous chords a half-step apart, or the short-short-long rhythmic figure.

The first performance was given by the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sir Adrian Boult at the Royal Albert Hall in London on 21 April 1948. Serge Koussevitzky led the score’s American premiere on 7 August 1948, at Tanglewood, with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Before that year was out, the same musicians had taken the work to Boston, Pittsburgh and Chicago.

It is a fantastic symphony. I am always gobsmacked by the “rat-a-tat” motif on trumpets that appears in the second movement. It is so full of tension.

The symphony is in 4 movements which, as we said above, are played without a pause between them:

1. Allegro –

2. Moderato –

3. Scherzo: Allegro vivace –

4. Epilogue: Moderato

I hope you enjoyed that.

Keith.