A Portrait of Vaughan Williams

Composers: Vaughan Williams
Released: 2000
Label: Nimbus
Code: NI1754

Description

“This super-budget Nimbus box set offers a wonderfully illuminating cross-section of Vaughan Willams’s music, showing its consistent inspiration, and both its diversity and it linkages…the orchestral and concertante music most sympathetically played under Willaim Boughton and presented amply and atmospherically, and with a rich amplitude of string sound. The chamber music shows a more intimate side of the composer: the special atmosphere of these works, with moments of haunting delicacy, is warmly and idiomatically caught. With Roger Best a fine viola soloist, Flos Campi is particulalry successful, as are the Te Deum and the shorter unaccompanied choral songs. All in all this is a cornucopia of music joys, worth getting, even if you already have recordings of the better-known orchestral pieces.” The Penguin Guide

Tracklisting

CD1
English String Orchestra William Boughton, conductor
Overture: The Wasps
The Lark Ascending, Michael Bochmann, violin
Fantasia on Greensleeves
Oboe Concerto, Maurice Bourgue, oboe
Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis
Five Variants of Dives and Lazarus

CD2
Christ Church Cathedral Choir, Oxford Stephen Darlington, director
Mass in G minor
Sacred & Secular Songs: Valiant-for-Truth (John Bunyan); The Blessed Son of God (Miles Coverdale, after Martin Luther); No Sad Thought His Soul Affright (Verse 1-Anon. Verse 2-Ursula Vaughan Williams); Lord, Thou has been our Refuge (Psalm xc); O Taste and See (Psalm xxxiv,8)
Three Shakespeare Songs : Full Fathom Five; The Cloud-Capp’d Towers; Over Hill, Over Dale

CD3
Medici String Quartet with Simon Rowland-Jones
Phantasy Quintet
String Quartet No. 1 in G minor
String Quartet No. 2 in A minor for Jean on her birthday

CD4
English Symphony Orchestra
Stephen Darlington, conductor
An Oxford Elegy, Jack May, narrator
Flos Campi, Roger Best, viola
Te Deum
O, Clap your Hands
The Old Hundreth Psalm Tune