He is the Sultan--he is the Sultan of Strings · 1:46am Feb 7th, 2021
It seems everybody's crazy for "The Lark Ascending" but this is my favorite Ralph von (oh good God) Vaughan Williams, and one of my favorites of all:
It's as if a door had opened, and there stood all Narnia before you.
If the Hudson River School of landscape painting was music....
I rather like several things by Vaughan Williams, and the two you've mentioned are certainly among those. I also rather like Flos Campi, and one with an interesting story behind it is Serenade to Music. He wrote it with a large number of solo voice parts, and he had specific people in mind for all of them, going so far as to mention them in the manuscript. For the premiere, they managed to get all those singers. They were quite famous in their time, but their fame really didn't last much beyond that, and today few people have heard of any of them. Kind of an illustrative example of "fame is fleeting."
Oh, quite nice. Thanks. :)
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The English pronounce it Rafe Vaughan Williams but ask any Englishman if he's seen Wreck it Rafe and really, the looks you get.