Vaughan Williams: Documentary

[Belle]

This documentary was released in 2008. You'll see from this documentary that Vaughan Williams was a ladies man and adored the fair sex and talked about sex a lot.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHMIqVY123s

I regard Vaughan Williams' "Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis" as one of the great masterpieces of the 20th century. (How well I remember the incoming Dean of Music at the university where I studied Musicology opening her inaugural address with some of the Bach 48 and VW's "Thomas Tallis" as illustrations of profound musicality.) The rush of those modal chord progressions of "Fantasia" (al la Tallis) in this music is literally ecstatic. Is it too much to read into this VW's obsession with sexual congress?

I really like his Symphony #2 "The London" and this is actually the recording I have of it. The second movement, Lento, is very glorious.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4VilwBPuAA

An original voice. And he wrote excellent film music too.

[barney]

Many thanks for posting this, Belle, and I will certainly make a point of getting to it. I know relatively little about VW.

[diegobueno]

I'll have to make a point of watching this video sometime soon. I love that the opening music is from the 8th symphony. RVW's orchestral palette became very colorful in his later years. This symphony includes lots of keyed percussion, or in his words "every 'spiel and 'phone known to the composer". The 6th and 9th include saxophones. He wrote a concerto for tuba and a rhapsody for harmonica and orchestra.

Like most British composers he was enamored of oratorios. His "O clap your hands" was sampled in the Beatles' electronic mash-up "Revolution no. 9".

Most recently I've become obsessed with his "Sea Symphony", his first symphony, but really an hour+ long oratorio to texts of Walt Whitman. The final movement, "The explorers", is a most admirable example of what I call "culmination", where the composer builds quietly over a long span of time to an overwhelming climax in which everything that's come before it becomes concentrated as through a magnifying glass into that one culminating moment.

(The ultimate culminating climax is, to my ears, the "Faust" movement of Mahler's 8th)