Information
Composer: Ralph Vaughan Williams
- The Story of a Flemish Farm
- The Loves of Joanna Godden
- Bitter Springs
BBC Philharmonic Orchestra
Rumon Gamba, conductor
Date: 2006
Label: Chandos
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Vaughan Williams’s 1942 score for the wartime propaganda film Flemish Farm was the fourth of 11 big-screen commissions he undertook between 1941 and 1958. He compiled this enjoyable seven-movement suite for a 1945 Prom and it serves up rich pickings, including plentiful echoes of the Fifth and Sixth symphonies.
Written in 1946, VW’s score for The Loves of Joanna Godden (set in and around Romney Marsh and Dungeness) consisted of music for 25 episodes, 10 of which were extracted with the composer’s approval for a 1948 recording. That selection has in turn been reconstructed and expanded by Stephen Hogger into an evocative 15-minute sequence, the icy chill that descends from 5'20" (complete with wordless female chorus) foreshadowing VW’s next film score, Scott of the Antarctic.
Bitter Springs (1950) also hailed from Ealing Studios. From a mere 38 bars of material penned by VW, music director Ernest Irving (dedicatee-to-be of the Sinfonia antartica) fashioned nine numbers, a further seven being of his own devising. Grateful as the composer was to Irving for the ‘marvels you have done with my silly tune’, the quality of inspiration is less consistent here, though in the swaggering main title there’s a lyrical idea which intriguingly anticipates the flowing viola melody that ushers in the second half of the Ninth Symphony’s finale (beam to 1'52" on track 9 to hear what I mean).
As on previous instalments these are handsomely groomed performances from the BBC Philharmonic under Rumon Gamba in superbly natural and vivid sound. Michael Kennedy’s notes carry the requisite authority. All in all, a CD well worth snapping up by VW fans and film-music buffs alike.
-- Andrew Achenbach, Gramophone
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Ralph Vaughan Williams (12 October 1872 – 26 August 1958) was an English composer. His compositional teachers included Hubert Parry and Charles Villiers Stanford at the Royal College of Music in London, Max Bruch in Berlin, and Maurice Ravel in Paris. Vaughan Williams' works include operas, ballets, chamber music, secular and religious vocal pieces and orchestral compositions including nine symphonies, written over sixty years. Strongly influenced by Tudor music and English folk-song, his output marked a decisive break in British music from its German-dominated style of the 19th century.
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Rumon Gamba (born 24 November 1972) is a British conductor. He studied music at Durham University, and then went to the Royal Academy of Music in London. In 1998, he joined the BBC Philharmonic as its Assistant Conductor, and later became Associate Conductor. He left the orchestra in 2002. Gamba was Chief Conductor and Music Director of the Iceland Symphony Orchestra from 2002 to 2010, and chief conductor of the Aalborg Symphony Orchestra from 2011 to 2015. In January 2022, Gamba became chief conductor of the Oulu Symphony Orchestra. He has made over 50 CDs of for the Chandos Records label.
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