Ralph Vaughan Williams was born 150 years ago and throughout 2022 it’s seemed that you can’t listen to BBC Radio 3 without hearing his music. Radio 4 has joined in, as has virtually every orchestra in the land as well as many recording companies. Yet there wasn’t any sign of RVW-fatigue among last night’s near-capacity audience for this Vaughan Williams “celebration” from the Bach Choir (with which the composer often sang, becoming its music director in the 1920s).
The days when Vaughan Williams was routinely dismissed as part of the cow-pat school of English music are long gone. True, he had an all-consuming interest in English folk music, but he was also one of this country’s most cosmopolitan composers. He studied with Maurice Ravel, and, of more relevance to this concert, early in his career he discovered the American poet Walt Whitman (also a lasting influence on the Beat poets, notably Allen Ginsberg: “What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman…”).
Just as for Ginsberg, Whitman offered RVW a distinctly unbuttoned exultation that turned out to be immensely productive. A Sea Symphony, his first symphony, dating from 1910, draws its garrulous text entirely from Whitman. It’s an immense piece, 70 minutes long and calling for a large orchestra (here, the Philharmonia), an even larger choir (I lost count at 150 singers), plus baritone and soprano soloists: unusually ambitious for an English symphony at that time.
Whitman’s freewheeling verse demanded and got a forthright response; the symphony starts with a bang, the immense strength of both the choir and the Festival Hall organ immediately apparent. Here and there, the text-setting is a little awkward: too often the chorus simply echoes the soloists, or vice-versa, but the absolute commitment and sheer power of the Bach Choir swept all doubt aside.
The symphony’s third section, The Waves, includes an almost onomatopoeic depiction of the wind, but it wasn’t all stormy turbulence: Hill gave moments of calm their full weight, and in quieter moments, it was easier to appreciate the communicative skill of the soloists, baritone Roderick Williams and soprano Elizabeth Watts, both expert in making the English language really sing. That isn’t as easy as it might sound.
The concert opened with more onomatopoeia in The Wasps Overture, with the strings sounding distinctly waspish. Later, the music seemed an uncanny foreshadowing of the score of many a Hollywood Western, Hill making the most of its expansiveness, while in Vaughan Williams’s setting of Swinburne’s poem The Garden of Proserpine, Watts proved both poised and oracular. All three pieces in the programme pre-dated the First World War; greater was to come, but RVW was already a force to be reckoned with.
