Roderick Williams and English Song:Themes and variations

13 February 2018: Stratford ArtsHouse
14 February 2018: Town Hall, Birmingham
6 April 2018: Worcester Cathedral

• Ralph Vaughan Williams – Five Variants of ‘Dives and Lazarus’
• Ralph Vaughan Williams – Five Mystical Songs
• Gerald Finzi – Let Us Garlands Bring, op18
• Gerald Finzi – Romance for String Orchestra, op11
• John Ireland – A Downland Suite

Ralph Vaughan Williams first encountered the folk-song Dives and Lazarus in 1893, when he was twenty-one; and he later said that “I had the sense of recognition – here’s something which I have known all my life, only I didn’t know it!” Michael Kennedy characterized the tune as emanating “from the soil of England”; and one of the end results (RVW was quite addicted to using it), which opens today’s concert, sounds (nearly) as natural as the composer breathing.

But why does this music feel ‘English’? What makes it so? Is it just that we have become accustomed to its ‘shape’, its style; or is there truly an identifiable vernacular? (In other words: would we sense, somehow, that this concert’s musical origins were all so ‘local’, if we had not seen the programme and its title; nor heard these composers before?)

John Ireland – whose A Downland Suite completes the programme – said that “folk-song influenced Vaughan Williams, but I have been more influenced by plainsong”: despite Charles Stanford (one of the originators, with Parry, of the broad style which so influenced the young Elgar) accusing him of sounding “all Brahms and water”! And yet both composers – as well as sharing Stanford as a teacher (although RVW went on to study with Ravel) – share a certain audible je ne sais quoi – or at least my (admittedly capacious) taste easily encompasses both (as well as Holst, Finzi, and Walton; Britten, Tippett, and Maxwell Davies). They also move me in a way that is at odds with the emotions provoked by, say, Mozart, or Messiaen; they speak to a different part of my heart (although I must emphasize that there is no room in there for nationalism of any political piquancy).

I wonder, were I not born of “this sceptred isle”, if they would still affect me like this. Elgar said (to Ireland), referencing The Dream of Gerontius and Richard Strauss, that “No-one in this country took any notice of my music until a German told them it was good”. In other words: I really do not have answers (certainly not simple ones) to the questions I posed above; I simply do not know! But maybe you will come to a different conclusion: once impressed by five outstanding examples of twentieth-century English music.