Ralph Vaughan Williams: Portraits of the Mind

This CD is a welcome continuation of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s 150^th birthday celebrations marked during 2022. Ian Venables was commissioned to write a commemorative work. The result is a splendid song cycle that is a perfect anniversary gift to the composer. Portraits of a Mind takes five poem/verses written by poets who RVW had set. Coupled with this, Venables used the same forces that the elder man had used in his masterly On Wenlock Edge – high voice, string quartet and piano. 

The first song, The Lark Ascending, pays tribute to RVW’s best known piece. Three stanzas of George Meredith’s eponymous poem had been appended to that score. Venables explains that he could not set the entire poem as it is a little long and wordy. So, he cut it down to five verses and slightly altered the flow of the text. The burden of the poem is for the skylark to symbolise “nature and the human spirit, freed from its earthly concerns.” The instrumental introduction provides a delicious parody of RVW’s work. This is followed by a setting of Man makes delight his own, a poem by Ursula Wood, penned the year before her marriage to RVW in 1953. The two sections of this song examine her husband’s creativity and its enduring quality. It builds to a considerable vocal climax before returning to the meditative music of the opening bars. I was introduced to English “lieder” by way of Vaughan Williams’s Songs of Travel sung by John Shirl
ey-Quirk and accompanied by Viola Tunnard. It was also my introduction to the poems of Robert Louis Stevenson, beyond A Child’s Garden of Verses. Venables has taken one of my favourites from that volume, From a Railway Carriage. The performance here is intense and ecstatic: it does not reflect the passing scene as viewed through the eyes of a child. The singer needs to calm down a bit. The fourth number is interesting. RVW had set several poems by Dante Gabriel Rossetti in his song cycle, The House of Life (1904). The same year he wrote a Symphonic Rhapsody for orchestra, based on Christina Rossetti’s poem Echo. Although this was premiered at Bournemouth under Dan Godfrey, the score has been lost.  Venables has taken this poem and created what is almost a “scena.” The sentiments include “the conflict between longing and joy; reality and memory and life and death.” Hardly surprising that this is a deeply moving and deliberately lugubrious setting. Vaughan Williams set several poems and texts by the influential American genius Walt Whitman, the most significant being A Sea Symphony. Venables chose a short poem to conclude his cycle, A Clear Midnight. The subject of the text is "about releasing the soul back into the universe." He has suggested that it brings the song cycle full circle: the freedom of the human spirit symbolised by the lark’s ascent in the first song, now mirrored by Whitman’s faith in the Soul’s transcendence.” This is truly a “holy place” to conclude this powerful tribute to Vaughan Williams.

Finally, there is no way that Portraits of a Mind is pastiche or even a parody. Ian Venables has lived and breathed the elder composer for most of his life. I think that he truly has absorbed the essence of RVW’s aesthetic.

My introduction to On Wenlock Edge was a centenary concert broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on 12 October 1972. Here, Richard Lewis gave a remarkable account of the orchestral edition. He was accompanied by the London Philharmonic Orchestra under the baton of Sir Adrian Boult. Other pieces performed that evening were the Symphony No.8 in D minor and the second part of Job, a masque for dancing. Somewhere, I still have my cassette tape made from the wireless that evening. The trouble is, that although I have heard the chamber version of On Wenlock Edge many times, both on record and ‘live’, I still have a marked preference for the orchestral one.

On Wenlock Edge was completed in 1909 and was premiered on 15 November of that year in the Aeolian Hall, London. The soloist was Gervase Elwes, the pianist Frederick Kiddle and the Schwiller Quartet. It is based on a judicious selection of poems drawn from A E Housman’s then ubiquitous volume A Shropshire Lad, published in 1896. These poems are full of gloom and tenderness, and require the soloist to enter into the mood of the poetry and its musical setting. The opening song, On Wenlock Edge is a vocal tone poem, descriptive of the “wood’s in trouble” and “the gale, [that] plies the saplings double.” It is brisk and picturesque. From Far, From Eve and Morning, is a solemn and perfectly stated reflection on the transience of life. The dialogue between the dead ploughman and his onetime friend in Is my team ploughing? is ghostly and tragically bitter. Alessandro Fisher gives a dramatic and almost violent account. Fortunately, RVW left out the line about “the keeper stands up to keep the goal.” (George Butterworth included it.). In total contrast, the noticeably short, Oh, When I was in love with you, is gentle and refined. The most significant song in the cycle is the Ravelian Bredon Hill. Here the ensemble creates a splendid evocation of a hot summer’s day, the ringing of the carillon, the winter snows, and the tolling bell. The death of the poet’s beloved is chilling in this performance, and the peroration “Oh, noisy bells, be dumb/I hear you, I will come” is tragic.  The final number is amazing. This poem reflects a journey, from the homely surroundings of the Shropshire landscape to the lonely streets of London and then out into the unknown, and possibly death. No matter what, the poet/singer will always remember Clun.

Before the outbreak of the First World War, Vaughan Williams had been working on another cycle of “mystical songs” to complement the Five composed in1911. This time he chose to set texts by Jeremy Taylor, Isaac Watts, Richard Crashaw and a translation by Robert Bridges. Originally devised for tenor, viola obligato and string orchestra, the Four Hymns were later rescored for piano and viola. It was performed in a version using the same forces as On Wenlock Edge in 1925. Sadly, this latter score has been lost. The RVW Society commissioned Iain Farrington to “review the two published scores and make a new one with a quartet.” The liner notes further explain that “much of the orchestral string writing is taken by the quartet, with the viola taking a dual role of soloist and ensemble player.”  The piano “fills and supports the sound” creating a powerful and rich effect. I find that this performance of the  Four Hymns too intense for my taste, although I understand that the mystical nature of the verses may call for an ecstatic vocal delivery.

The excellent liner notes give all the information required to enjoy and appreciate these three song cycles. A little more detail for On Wenlock Edge would have been of interest. Ian Venables’s discussion of his Portraits of a mind is a detailed study. The texts for all the songs are given. Profiles of Venables, Iain Farrington and the performers are included.

Overall, this is a splendid performance by all concerned. That said, I find Alessandro Fisher, tenor, at times just a bit too intense and over dramatic, if not piercing. There seems to be few moments in these song cycles of repose, reflection, or intimacy.

Finally, age tends to bring a singular problem: the first performance of a work heard often remains the favourite. In my case it is the above mentioned account of On Wenlock Edge by Richard Lewis, followed closely by Ian Partridge (1970) and for a later recording, that by Philip Langridge (1990).

Track Listing:
Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958)
On Wenlock Edge: Song cycle for tenor voice, string quartet and piano (1909)
Ian Venables (b.1955)
Portraits of a Mind: Song cycle for high voice, string quartet and piano (2022)
Ralph Vaughan Williams
Four Hymns arranged by Iain Farrington, for tenor voice, string quartet and piano (1912-14/2022)
Alessandro Fisher (tenor), William Vann (piano), The Navarra String Quartet: Benjamin Marquise Gilmore (violin), Annabelle Meare (violin), Sascha Bota (viola), Brian O’Kane (cello)
rec. 14-15 November 2022, St George’s Church, Headstone, Harrow, London
Albion Records ALBCD 057