Collegium Musicum Of London Chamber Choir

This spring, on the 150th anniversary of the composer’s birth, Collegium Musicum of London Chamber Choir celebrates the music of Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958).

Vaughan Williams’s work was strongly influenced by Tudor music and English folksong, and his output marked a decisive break in British music from its German-dominated style of the 19th century.

The Five Mystical Songs (1911), is one of Vaughan Williams’s first fully-fledged masterpieces. The cycle sets poems by the 17th-century Anglican priest George Herbert. At its centre is Love Bade Me Welcome which, marrying one of the greatest examples of Herbert’s lyric poetry with music of beauty and a rapt spirituality, is one of the finest songs in the English language.

In his Serenade to Music (1938), Vaughan Williams chose to adapt text from Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, where the characters discuss the ‘music of the spheres’. The work was composed as a tribute to the conductor Sir Henry Wood, and in the audience at the work’s premiere at the Albert Hall was Sergei Rachmaninov, who – at the conclusion of the performance – declared that he had never before been so moved by music.

Vaughan Williams’s Mass in G minor was written in 1921, and was the first mass to be written in a distinctly English style since the 16th century. ‘There is no reason why an atheist could not write a good Mass’, insisted Vaughan Williams, and the duality between the ‘modern idiom’ and the ‘old liturgical spirit’ lies at the heart of the composition’s success. It takes as its starting point the sound world of the 1700s with its modal writing and subtle imitation, a style which Vaughan Williams had already utilised in his Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis.

The Lark Ascending needs no introduction, though this version – arranged for organ and violin – is sure to come as a pleasant surprise. The work is full of the folk melodies that the composer loved to collect, with singing violin lines mingling with the sounds of the earth before breaking free, rising to ever loftier heights. The mood is deeply nostalgic, and the composer's writing evokes glorious images of the British countryside.