Canter Bridge

It is perhaps impossible to hear Vaughan Williams’ short works performed more beautifully and unforgettably than in this 1972 ADRM/Argo recording. Neville Marriner and the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields acquit themselves above reproach. Vaughan Williams—you love him or hate him—must be loved for his Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, that haunting and almost religiously uplifting setting of Medieval plainsong that is capable of shifting a driver to the side of the road in open-jawed amazement at the sheer evocative beauty of it.

Greensleeves is emblematic of the English countryside and its melody, easily dismissed as the primped-up stuff of ‘Rule Brittania’ shops, is so much more worthwhile than all that. Iona Brown’s violin on ‘The Lark Ascending’ sounds as though crafted to play this piece once—enduringly—and then tossed like unused Eucharistic wine.

How, one wonders in aesthetic and rationally unguarded moments, could a nation that produced such music have lost an Empire? Or, more accurately, how could a people capable of such lyricism have done otherwise than believed—for an historical blink of an eye—in its own superiority?

That a coterie of English musicians should produce the definitive recording of these works is poetically appropriate.

That listeners of many tongues should listen and wonder at Williams’ temperamental genius is simply a musical fact on the ground.

Begin Vaughan Williams with this recording. The rest are derivative.