Vaughan Williams - Fantasia on the ‘Old 104th’, The Lark Ascending, Piano Quintet, etc.
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Label: Resonus Classics
Cat No: RES10311
Format: CD
Number of Discs: 1
Release Date: 9th December 2022
Contents
Works
Fantasia on the Old 104thPiano Quintet in C minor
Romance for viola and piano
The Lark Ascending (version for violin and piano)
Artists
Mark Bebbington (piano)Duncan Riddell (violin)
Abigail Fenna (viola)
City of London Choir
Royal Philharmonic Orchestra
Conductor
Hilary Davan WettonWorks
Fantasia on the Old 104thPiano Quintet in C minor
Romance for viola and piano
The Lark Ascending (version for violin and piano)
Artists
Mark Bebbington (piano)Duncan Riddell (violin)
Abigail Fenna (viola)
City of London Choir
Royal Philharmonic Orchestra
Conductor
Hilary Davan WettonAbout
To mark the 150th anniversary of the birth of Ralph Vaughan Williams, pianist Mark Bebbington, members of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and conductor Hilary Davan Wetton, present a recording of the composer’s almost totally neglected orchestral work, Fantasia on the Old 104th, for solo piano, choir and orchestra premiered at the Three Choirs Festival in 1950.
The album also features the Romance for viola and piano; the ever popular The Lark Ascending in the original 1914 version for solo violin and piano; and the early but ambitious Piano Quintet of 1904, which was embargoed untill as late as the 1990s and scored for the same combination of instruments as Schubert’s ‘Trout’ Quintet.
The album also features the Romance for viola and piano; the ever popular The Lark Ascending in the original 1914 version for solo violin and piano; and the early but ambitious Piano Quintet of 1904, which was embargoed untill as late as the 1990s and scored for the same combination of instruments as Schubert’s ‘Trout’ Quintet.
Sound/Video
Paused
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1Piano Quintet in C minor: 1. Allegro con fuoco
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2Piano Quintet in C minor: 2. Andante
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3Piano Quintet in C minor: 3. Fantasia (quasi variazioni)
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4The Lark Ascending (original version of 1914)
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5Romance for viola and piano
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6Fantasia (quasi variazione) on the ‘Old 104th’ Psalm Tune
Europadisc Review
Over the years, pianist Mark Bebbington has established a reputation as a powerful champion of British music, and he makes his own very individual contribution to this year’s Vaughan Williams centenary with an admirably collegial disc on the Resonus label, partnered by musicians from the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra as well as the City of London Choir.
Most of the works here are relative rarities, and even the best known - the perennially popular romance The Lark Ascending - is heard in its less familiar first version (premiered in 1920) for violin and piano. There’s an extra level of intimacy and sense of emotional questing in this version compared with the nostalgic colours of the far more familiar orchestral form. It’s a useful and fascinating corrective, and one to which the RPO’s leader Duncan Riddell and Bebbington rise (no pun intended) with a combination of touching sensitivity and expressive abandon. Riddell is gloriously sweet-tined but never cloying, and in Bebbington he has the most attentive of partners.
Bebbington is more fully in the spotlight with the disc’s opening work. Completed in 1903, premiered in 1905, but withdrawn in 1918 and then unheard until the 1990s, the Piano Quintet in C minor is one of Vaughan Williams’s most compelling pieces of chamber music. Cast in three movements, and scored for the same instrumental line-up as Schubert’s ‘Trout’ Quintet, it represents the composer’s early output at its most assured. Particularly notable is the way in which the third movement seems to emerge organically from the central Andante before setting out on its series of variations.
In this splendidly assured account, the opening Allegro con fuoco is impassioned, with a marvellous sense of sweep and abandon, but also - thanks to the inclusion of double bass in the scoring, and to Bebbington’s richly-textured piano playing - tremendous depth. The central Andante has wonderful warmth in its glowing outer sections, which sets off the more agitated and urgent central episode most effectively. The concluding Fantasia (quasi variazioni) takes the listener through a kaleidoscopic range of moods and textures, leading to suggestions of bells pealing at the powerful close, all superbly characterised by Bebbington and the string principals of the RPO.
It’s a measure of how used these string players are to working together that the transition from The Lark to the Romance for viola and piano is so effortless, with violist Abigail Fenna matching Riddell's tone in the higher passages. The only indication that we’re hearing a different player is when the music dips below the G that is the violin’s lowest note to the rich lower register that is so unmistakably the viola’s. Where The Lark seems caught in wistful reverie, the Romance (with which it is roughly contemporary) has moments of high passion to set alongside passages of eloquent introspection, perfectly complemented here by a wide dynamic and tonal range, and unfailingly sensitive musicianship. Those looking for a recording of this particular work could hardly do better.
The latest work on the disc is the Fantasia on the ‘Old 104th’ Psalm Tune, one of the less well-known by-products of Vaughan Wlliams’s editorship of the English Hymnal (1906). It takes as its musical starting point the 17th-century psalm tune by Thomas Ravenscroft for Psalm 104. The genre model for this work, however, could be Beethoven’s ‘Choral Fantasy’, likewise scored for solo piano, chorus and orchestra. (The Fantasy was first performed in private in November 1949 with string quartet and piano, and the following September in Gloucester Cathedral in its full orchestral form, as heard here.) As booklet annotator Nigel Simeone points out, there are also precedents in the finales of piano concertos by Busoni and Alan Bush, as well as Constant Lambert’s Rio Grande.
The mixture of sacred and secular, of quasi-improvisatory cadenzas and chorale-like periodicity, of faith and doubt (this last pair highlighted by Simeone), is unique to Vaughan Williams. In the cadenza-like solo passages, Bebbington marries peerless command of the knotty, often Lisztian piano writing with both tonal brilliance and a proper extempore feel. The City of London Choir, under their principal conductor Hilary Davan Wetton, bring an exultant feel to the choral passages, and further colour is lent by the forces of the RPO, notably in the resplendent final pages. There’s no lack of focus, nor do the combined forces of chorus and orchestra overwhelm the piano (as they appear to have done at its Gloucester premiere!). It’s a splendid way to close this spellbinding disc, and the perfect way to round off this year’s centenary for the many lovers of RVW’s music.
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