RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS (1872-1958)

Willow-Wood

 

Toward the Unknown Region (Song for Chorus and Orchestra)

Willow-Wood (Cantata for Baritone and Orchestra)

The Voice out of the Whirlwind (Motet for Chorus and Orchestra)

Five Variants of Dives and Lazarus (for Strings and Harp)

The Sons of Light (Cantata for Chorus and Orchestra)

Darkness and Light

The Song of the Zodiac

The Messengers of Speech

 

Roderick Williams (baritone); Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra/ David Lloyd-Jones

 

A sensational new CD: the world premiere recording of the early cantata Willow-Wood by Ralph Vaughan Williams performed by magnificent baritone Roderick Williams with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra and Choir under David Lloyd-Jones.

 

Scored for baritone, women’s choir and orchestra, Willow-Wood is a luxuriant setting of part of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s sequence The House of Life. The work first appeared as a scena for baritone and piano in March 1903. It was performed in an extended version in 1909, but despite positive press and the publication of the vocal score, Willow-Wood has not been heard again until now.

 

The CD also contains other Vaughan Williams rarities. Unrecorded since the LP era, the choral cantata The Sons of Light is a dazzling depiction of the passing of the sun, with many of the magical harmonic and rhythmical effects for which Vaughan Williams was renowned.

 

The Voice out of the Whirlwind, a motet for chorus and orchestra was written for the first of the post-war annual St Cecilia Day services in London. Vaughan Williams later orchestrated it for his Leith Hill Festival at Dorking. This orchestrated version has never been available on CD.

 

 “I am certain that listening to Willow-Wood (finely sung by Roderick Williams) will come as a revelation to all lovers of British music. It seems to have been composed in a white-heat of intensity and has a very special, all-pervading atmosphere.” David Lloyd-Jones

 

Overlooked for close on a century, Vaughan Williams's "Willow-Wood" is a voluptuous, evocative piece for baritone, women's chorus and orchestra that will surely win more performances on the back of this fine première recording.

The supple, expressive voice of Roderick Williams is allied to the refinement of texture, emotional rapture and discreetly coloured playing that David Lloyd-Jones draws from the RLPO, capturing the mood of fragile, evanescent imagery in Dante Gabriel Rossetti's poetry.

"Willow-Wood" has been aptly likened to a Pre-Raphaelite tableau. Listening to it, we might draw parallels with the soft edges, sumptuous hues and languid wistfulness of a Rossetti painting, so atmospherically fluid is the music and so haunting its impact, not least when the wordless women's chorus eddies around the protagonist in a ghostly swirl of sound.

As with the other vocal music on this disc, "Willow-Wood" testifies to the fertile inspiration that RVW derived from words. "Toward the Unknown Region", based on Walt Whitman, is a companion piece to "A Sea Symphony", sharing with it many recognisable stylistic traits, as indeed does the much later motet "The Voice Out of the Whirlwind".

The delicate scoring of the purely orchestral "Five Variants of Dives and Lazarus" provides a pensive interlude before "The Sons of Light", a dramatic cantata to words by Ursula Wood (the future Mrs Vaughan Williams), and, in this stirring performance, a radiant climax to a striking disc.

Geoffrey Norris, Telegraph

 

Naxos 8557798