A Vaughan Williams Celebration
The JCS joins the 2019 St Marylebone Festival in a celebration on 23 July of the works of Ralph Vaughan Williams. Our contribution includes singing his Mass in G minor, which he set for unaccompanied double choir and soloists. Of this work, composed in 1921, Barry Creasy has written ‘… Its musical link with the pastoral works is unmissable, as the piece is full of the rich harmonies associated with the composer in his most ‘English summertime’ moments, but the origins of the piece are also, as with Howell’s Requiem, in the revival of English polyphony and with Vaughan Williams’ identification of his music with ‘the imperishable glories of English prose’…
…The piece is dedicated to Gustav Holst and the Whitsuntide Singers (Holst and Vaughan Williams were very close at this time), and it received its first performance on 6 December 1922 in Birmingham Town Hall. The first liturgical performance was at Westminster Cathedral under R R Terry…
…The success of the Mass in G minor as a liturgical work in post-war Britain, is best summed up in Terry’s own words to Vaughan Williams: ‘I’m quite sincere when I say that it is the work one has all along been waiting for. In your individual and modern idiom you have really captured the old liturgical spirit and atmosphere.’
The JCS will also perform song settings that span RVW’s life as a composer, from his days studying at the Royal College of Music under Stanford in the mid-1890s through to his 1953 setting of the words of Ursula Wood’s poem Silence and Music – RVW’s contribution to the song cycle A Garland for the Queen in her Coronation Year – and doubly relevant to this Marlylebone festival, as from their marriage in 1953 until his death in 1958, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Ursula lived at Hanover Terrace nearby in Regent’s Park.
This concert programme also features RVW’s song cycle for tenor On Wenlock Edge and his Blake Songs for oboe and tenor, performed by Christopher Bowen, tenor; Clare Hoskins, oboe; The Bell Quartet and Gavin Roberts, piano.
Get tickets from the Festival here.