• This year’s 150th anniversary of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s birth has prompted welcome pairings of his music with some of his composer associates. Among his most gifted students was Elizabeth Maconchy (1907-94), who praised his inspirational teaching not for technical instruction but for pushing her to the highest artistic ideals and banishing all risk of “cheap effects”.
Songs of Elizabeth Maconchy & Ralph Vaughan Williams, Volume 1 (Resonus), sung by James Geer (tenor) with Ronald Woodley (piano), combines the familiar and novel. Vaughan Williams’s cycle Songs of Travel is given new buoyancy when sung by a tenor instead of the more usual baritone. Maconchy’s songs, mostly unpublished and some recovered from manuscripts, span 70 years, moving from simple lyric to modernist invention. The dramatic scene Faustus (1971) shows Maconchy at the height of her game, giving equal authority to voice and piano, performed with persuasive urgency by Greer and Woodley. This is the first of two discs. I look forward to the next.
• With a Finnish first violinist, Welsh second, Irish violist and English cellist, there’s no easy way to sum up the Castalian String Quartet, let alone the music they play, often written for another medium altogether. Between Two Worlds (Delphian), on a loose theme of darkness to light, has Beethoven’s late quartet, No 15 in A minor, Op 132, at its heart, beautifully sprung, precise and detailed. The pivotal “thanksgiving” slow movement is taut and serene. A compelling reason to buy the disc is Thomas Adès’s The Four Quartets, Op 28 (2011), tracing the course of the day from the whispered harmonics of Nightfalls to the zestful pizzicatos of Morning Dew, the persistent ostinatos of Days and the disrupted fictions of The Twenty-Fifth Hour.
The album opens with La nuit froide et sombre by Orlando de Lassus, and closes with John Dowland’s Come, Heavy Sleep, both arranged by the group’s first violinist, Sini Simonen. Many quartets have broken the tradition of single-composer discs. The Castalians do it with top performances and meticulous imagination.
• Two operas on TV: Scottish Opera’s production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Gondoliers, with the brilliant Richard Suart as the Duke of Plaza-Toro, is on BBC Four tomorrow tonight at 8pm. And go to BBC iPlayer for Danielle DeNiese in Poulenc’s one-woman opera La Voix Humaine, conducted by Antonio Pappano.
