by Daniel Hathaway
IN THIS EDITION:
. An engaging ritual celebrated nightly since 1549
. Contemporary music at Oberlin
. Revisiting the music of Ralph Vaughan Williams
TODAY’S EVENTS:
At 6pm, Trinity Chamber Choir will sing the traditional Anglican service of Choral Evensong commemorating Edith Cavell +1915, nurse and martyr. with Jeremy Jackman’s responses, William Byrd’s Fauxbourdon Service, and Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Valiant-for-Truth. The Rev. Peter Faass officiates and Todd Wilson conducts.
This 45-minute service will be sung by Trinity’s resident choirs and guests every Wednesday from October through May at Trinity Cathedral, 2230 Euclid Ave., Cleveland. On his blog, concert pianist and polymath Stephen Hough (himself a Roman Catholic), wrote about the engaging British ritual, which has been sung nightly around the world sinc 1549:
Evensong hangs on the wall of life like an old, familiar cloak passed through the generations. Rich with prayer and scripture, it is nevertheless totally nonthreatening. It is a service into which all can stumble without censure – a rambling old house where everyone can find some corner to sit and think, to listen with half-attention, trailing a few absentminded fingers of faith or doubt in its passing stream.
And tonight at 7:30 in Warner Concert Hall,, the Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble, conducted by Tim Weiss, will feature faculty flutist Alexa Still in Thea Musgrave’s Orfeo III, and soprano Tony Arnold in Oliver Knussen’s Requiem – Songs for Sue. Hale Smith’s Dialogues and Commentaries & Alison Yun-Fei Jiang’s Temporal are also on the free program. Warner Concert Hall, Free.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
On this date in 1872, Ralph Vaughan Williams was born in Down Ampney, Yorkshire, a village after which the British composer named one of the popular hymn tunes he wrote while serving as editor of The English Hymnal, published in 1906. (Listen to an arrangement made and played by Todd Wilson with the choir and instrumentalists of First-Pilgrim Church in Lincoln, Nebraska, in 2014.)
Writing in The Guardian, Hugh Morris reconsiders the works of Britain’s favorite composer in his anniversary year.
“When encountering an unfamiliar composition by Ralph Vaughan Williams, I find myself asking the same questions: where have I heard this before? Do I know this already or am I simply imagining it?
“Clear answers are offered by Eric Saylor’s groundbreaking biography, released to coincide with Vaughan Williams’s 150th birthday. Saylor approaches his subject with fresh ears and a host of thoroughly researched and well-rounded insights that look set to change the discourse surrounding the composer in his anniversary year.”
The range of RVW’s work was vast. Let’s suggest just two radically different compositions that reflect his lifelong interests.
The first represents his close association with English folksong, of which he collected numerous examples and made arrangements for various combinations of voices and instruments. He so internalized that repertoire that he could write easily in the style, as proved by his settings of Edwardian poet A.E. Housman’s verse in Along the Field, simply but eloquently scored for solo voice and violin. Listen here to a performance of the cycle by soprano Marie Henriett Reinhold and violinist Dietrich Reinhold.
The other extreme finds Vaughan Williams exploring the full range of drama at his disposal as an early 20th century composer. Orchestrally, this expresses itself in his symphonies and in such works as Job, a Masque for Dancing, with its frightening musical depictions of Satan, but otherwise in A Vision of Aeroplanes, his charmingly titled setting of the Vision of Ezekiel from the Hebrew scriptures for organ and chorus. The organ part is as fearsome for the keyboardist as the musical declamation is for the singers. Stay with it to the end in this performance by the University of Cambridge’s Clare College Choir.
Nearly everyone has a favorite high school English teacher, and mine was the late Martha Herrick, who deadened the blow of exams and quizzes by playing Vaughan Williams on her classroom phonograph at Topeka High School.
She was a true fan who once dreamed about watching RVW composing in his study. The vision was so detailed and compelling that she wrote about it in a letter to the composer’s widow, Ursula, whom she had never met. The reply — Martha had described her husband’s work habits perfectly although no one but the composer had ever entered his creative sanctuary — initiated a friendship renewed over tea in London in many subsequent years.
