'High Midsummer Pomps' - Vaughan-Williams' Oxford Elegy

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ob4y4ZO8i5M

 

    Just back from Rome it is a pleasure to see the garden burgeoning with lots of green. BBC Radio 3 are presently playing one piece of British music each day nominated by its listeners. I have just emailed them to suggest a wonderful late work of Ralph Vaughan-Williams: ‘The Oxford Elegy’ for narrator, semi-chorus and orchestra. Written late in his life I don’t think it is performed often because of its unusual combination of forces: as well as a first class choir and orchestra it must have a first-rate actor to speak the parts of Arnold’s wonderful poems upon which VW based his piece. There is something about the text, the English idyll of the ‘Dreaming Spires’ of Oxford and its environs, VW’s evocative music (just listen to the way he writes for the viola!) and the elegiac quality of a late piece clearly remembering his youthful ‘field days’ with Gustav Holst that makes this, for me, a quintessentially British piece. I attach a link to Youtube if you would like to listen to it and leave you with the words of Arnold, set by Vaughan-Williams, as we approach the summer solstice:

    ‘Soon will the high Midsummer pomps come on,
        Soon will the musk carnations break and swell,
    Soon shall we have gold-dusted snapdragon,
        Sweet-William with his homely cottage-smell,
            And stocks in fragrant blow;
    Roses that down the alleys shine afar,
        And open, jasmine-muffled lattices,
        And groups under the dreaming garden-trees,
    And the full moon, and the white evening-star.’ Pale pink convolvulus in tendrils creep;

               And air-swept lindens yield http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ob4y4ZO8i5Mhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ob4y4ZO8i5Mhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ob4y4ZO8i5M

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFFD2u-FreY

       And bower me from the August sun with shade;

And the eye travels down to Oxford's towers.