Ralph Vaughan Williams
was a prolific composer who worked at various levels of the musical world, and despite the efforts of specialist labels, there seems to be not only a good supply of works left to discover but also audiences for these; this album made classical best-seller lists in early 2024.
In Windsor Forest
, a kind of cantata extracted by
Vaughan Williams
from his opera
Sir John in Love
(based on
Shakespeare
's The Merry Wives of Windsor) has been recorded before, but the version here for strings and piano receives its world premiere and would seem ideally suited to the needs of local choral societies and the like. There are some small, well-judged occasional pieces, one written to mark the death of
King George V
and transcriptions of
Bach
and
Orlando Gibbons
. Not fitting into the "retrospect" category but equally interesting is the
Violin Concerto in D major ("Concerto Accademico")
, given an ideally astringent performance by violinist
Jack Liebeck
. This work was written for violinist
Jelly d'Arányi
, who was also the dedicatee of several
Bartók
works, and one might not guess
RVW
as the composer if one did not already know; it is an unusually edgy work with metric shifts that may indeed remind one of
. The
London Choral Sinfonia
has just the right accessibility and warmth in the shorter pieces, and the album, as a whole, has a feeling not of completism but of exploring the great variety of
' music, something not always fully appreciated. ~ James Manheim