Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958)
Royal Throne of Kings – Ralph Vaughan Williams and Shakespeare
Eloise Irving (soprano)
Malcolm Riley (piano)
Albion Singers
Kent Sinfonia/James Ross
rec. 2024, St. Gregory’s and St. Martin’s Church, Wye, UK (orchestral works); St. Leonard’s Church, Hythe, Kent, UK (songs)
Albion Records ALBCD062 [72]
The industrious A&R folk at Albion Records have been gearing up for a busy Autumn release schedule. There are four discs of new recordings alongside a fifth of archive material that mainly features “their” composer Ralph Vaughan Williams. Given the breadth and number of Albion’s previous releases, there is little major music they have not yet explored. Even so, for the Vaughan Williams enthusiast there are still treasures to be unearthed.
The disc named Royal Throne of Kings explores scores which Vaughan Williams wrote as mainly incidental music for Shakespeare’s plays. As ever, the booklet is a model of interest and information. As it succinctly says, “for [Vaughan Williams] Shakespeare represented a love affair that never ended”. That being the case, the programme includes a 1897 setting of the Willow Song through to two excerpts from the 1955 film The England of Elizabeth. (These are not the familiar Three Portraits from ‘The England of Elizabeth’.) The main performers here are the Kent Sinfonia, a scratch professional orchestra conducted by James Ross, and soprano Eloise Irving accompanied by pianist Malcolm Riley. The nature of incidental music can lead to a certain degree of stylistic repetition. That is why the programme has been intelligently handled to intersperse the suites of orchestral music with the solo songs.
The disc opens with a literal flourish, My Kingdom for a horse from the Stratford score for Richard III. That leads straight into the longest work on the disc at over seventeen minutes: a newly created Richard II Concert Fantasy. The multiple cues for this 1944 radio production were edited and published by Nathaniel Lew. In 2019, Martin Yates recorded it on Dutton with the RSNO. Lew has revisited the work. He has made the valid point that the 34 cues are by definition short, so listening in sequence is a fragmentary experience. He has created a new continuous work based on those cues. However, the new work does not seek to preserve the narrative of the original. Although all the music is by Vaughan Williams, not all the cues are present.
As a stand-alone ‘new’ work, it is actually rather impressive and well played by the fify-or-so-strong Kent Sinfonia. Lew has skilfully arranged the music to create a dramatic logic and arc independent of the original play’s narrative. The score is full of recognisable Vaughan Williams musical fingerprints from modal fanfares that pre-echo Scott of the Antarctic (just four years in the future) to brooding string passages that are audible relations of the later symphonies. Conductor James Ross, here and through the programme, has a good sense of flow and expressive range of the music. For the works on this disc which are explicitly incidental music, the scale of the orchestra is effective. For this concert fantasy, well played though it is, I could imagine that the additional desks of strings in a full symphony orchestra would give additional tonal weight to good effect.
Martin Yates has also provided an alternative version of the original Henry V Overture. The 1913 orchestral score was believed lost but the music survived in Vaughan Williams’s own reworking for brass band in 1933. The latter, though, was not a straight transcription for brass. Yates’s orchestration is based on the later work. The new Albion recording is derived from incomplete orchestral parts found in the Stratford Shakespeare Memorial Library. Clarinet and bassoon parts were missing and, according to the liner notes, have not been conjecturally restored. Again, it is hard not to be impressed by the sweep and heft of the RSNO performance and Yates’s more opulent orchestration. Yet, as an example of an overture written with a specific dramatic purpose, this original version is of genuine interest.
Unsurprisingly, the notes say that Vaughan Williams wrote the scores for the Stratford stagings under the common pressure of time. The use of existing folk tunes and dances, hymns and plainsong speaks not just to a wish to recreate a sense of ‘period’ and authenticity. There is also a pragmatic realisation that it was quicker to knock out an arrangement of an existing – often familiar – tune than to write something wholly new. The notes also say that several of these cues were interchangeable between plays. The two suites drawn from the 1913 productions are called the Henry IV Suite (seven movements in roughly twelve minutes) and Stratford Suite (six sections running twenty-two minutes).
The highlight of the Henry IV Suite is Vaughan Williams’s transcription of Dowland’s Music to my weary spirit. It gets a lovely hushed performance by the strings of the Kent Sinfonia. A couple of tracks later the “Albion Singers” make their only hearty contribution to the disc. The booklet lists the names of the singers which includes pianist Malcolm Riley and his wife, and John Francis. The resulting sound is suitably energetic and earthy, much as it would be when performed in a theatre by actors, not singers.
Much of the remainder of these two suites are attractive and often familiar melodies. Arranger Nathaniel Lew notes that the Stratford Suite combines some twenty cues from five plays where Vaughan Williams used thirteen folksongs, a hymn tune and a phrase borrowed from a 17th-century Virginal Book. In this suite, only the opening Royal March [track 16] and Solemn March [track 20] contain ‘original’ music. Both these pieces fulfil their function and again have echoes and hints of other scores without being truly memorable. I found it striking that, for the time of their creation, Vaughan Williams’s use of these ‘ancient’ and folk musical sources was quite unusual. It had me in mind of Warlock’s Capriol Suite until I realised that that work would not be written for another thirteen years, and the bulk of the revival of interest in Elizabethan music occurred after World War I.
It was interesting to read in the notes that this unconventional sourcing and use of incidental music was soon replaced, once Vaughan Williams left Stratford in May 1913, by the more conventional “old hotch potch” in the words of Ursula Vaughan Williams. A similar use of pre-existing folk or historical dances and tunes makes up the two excerpts from The England of Elizabeth. As far as I know, the arrangements made by Muir Matheson have not been recorded before. The same music can be found as part of the near-complete suite from the film edited by Stephen Hogger as part of volume 2 of the Chandos survey of Vaughan Williams’s film music. The music is attractive and well played. What I find most fascinating is his handling of similar material in a consistent manner to that 40 years earlier in the Stratford suites.
As I noted, the instrumental suites and selections are broken up by piano and voice song settings. Eloise Irving has a very attractive, natural and unaffected singing style, with good clarity of diction and accurate pitch. Perhaps her vibrato is occasionally just a little ‘fluttery’ but overall the style of singing and Malcolm Riley’s playing is gentle and intimate. The brief Three Songs from Shakespeare benefit greatly from this unadorned approach. Albion Records have recorded this before in 2018 as part of the “Song of Love” programme with mezzo-soprano Kitty Whately. I have not heard that version, so I cannot compare, but these are rare and rather lovely settings. Given the attractiveness of these songs, it is surprising that they are not better represented in the general catalogue.
So here is another excellent survey from Albion, sensitively performed and beautifully presented. The nature of the suites means that this is music I prefer to dip into rather than listen to at a single sitting. With that small proviso, this is another illuminating addition to the Albion catalogue.
Nick Barnard
Buying this recording via a link below generates revenue for MWI, which helps the site remain free.
Contents
My Kingdom for a horse (1913) edited by Malcolm Riley
Richard II Concert Fantasy (1944) arr. Nathaniel Lew
The Willow Song (1897)
Henry IV Suite (1913) edited by Malcolm Riley
Orpheus with his lute (1903)
Henry V Overture (original version, 1913) reconstructed David Owen Norris, edited by Malcolm Riley
Three Songs from Shakespeare (1925)
Stratford Suite (1913) arr. Nathaniel Lew
Dirge for Fidele (1922) arr. for strings and harp by Malcolm Riley
Two Shakespeare Sketches from ‘The England of Elizabeth’ (1955) arr. Muir Mathieson
