Ralph Vaughan Williams
         Folk Songs of Britain

* 19 Traditional Folk Songs arranged by Vaughan Williams

Desmond Dupre (lute), Deller Consort (Eileen Poulter, Mary Thomas,
Alfred Deller, Wilfred Brown, Gerald English, Maurice Bevan, Geoffrey
Coleby)/Alfred Deller Vanguard Classics OVC8109 Total time: 50:51

Summary for the Busy Executive: 19 gems.

It is well-known that British folk music greatly inspired Vaughan
Williams throughout his long career.  The settings here, for example,
come from as early as 1912 to as late as 1943.  He was also working on
further settings when he died.  Indeed, one notes the tendency in some
writers to view Vaughan Williams as bumptiously folky himself, a naive,
"home-made" artist.  This grossly misunderstands the nature of the
composer's achievement, far closer to Bartok's than to, say, Grieg's.
Vaughan Williams was, among other things, a Cambridge intellectual, who
had studied in England, Germany, and France with considerable teachers,
including Parry, Stanford, Bruch, and Ravel.  He knew the music of his time
better than most because he made the effort to seek it out.  To all the
other places he lived, he preferred London.  He was a Londoner as surely
as Aaron Copland was a New Yorker, despite the "evidence" of Appalachian
Spring.

The settings on this CD struck me most forcibly in their variety.  We
have early work from 1912, originally for voice and piano (here done by
voice and lute), very similar to the arrangements of Cecil Sharp.  We also
have what amounts to major recomposition.  However, far from finding a
style suitable to folk music, Vaughan Williams invents several styles, or,
rather, he fits the setting to the style he works in for other music as
well.  This becomes most apparent when you compare different arrangements
of the same tune - something, for obvious reasons, the CD doesn't provide.
The only relatively "straight" arrangement in the program is the composer's
version of "Greensleeves" (1943).  He recasts the well-known instrumental
interlude from his opera Sir John in Love (1929) for voices.  At the same
time, however, he didn't in the first place write the obvious.  The harmony
has a bit of sour to it, much like the sixth and seventh symphonies, also
from the Forties.  One gets the impression that he occasionally went back
over previous work to mine nuggets that he had previously missed or to
develop hints into something full-blown and new.  "Bushes and Briars" - not
just a favorite tune of the composer's, but one that functioned as a major
revelation and set him on his artistic path - has the austerity of Holst's
"Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John," while "Ward the Pirate," for men's voices,
takes florid vocal ornament to an exuberant extreme.  How he manages the
latter within the restricted range of men's voices is a lesson in craft all
by itself.  I could talk about each track beyond the limits of boredom, so
I'd prefer to mention those settings that, among small masterpieces, stand
out.

"My Boy Billy," from 1912, deftly unfolds in a 4 + 3 meter, most likely in
the manner the folk singer (in this case, undoubtedly a member of the folk)
originally sung it to Vaughan Williams.  Vaughan Williams's genius lies in
the fact that he knew gold when he had it and didn't try to "correct" the
rhythmic oddity.  "An Acre of Land" sounds simple and unforced, but close
examination reveals some rather sophisticated dissonance which sneaks past
the ear.  "The Lover's Ghost," "The Wassail Song," "Bushes and Briars," and
"Just as the Tide was Flowing" count as the most elaborate arrangements on
the program, all with structures that push past and to some extent work
against the strophic arrangement of the original songs.  "Ca' the Yowes"
and "Loch Lomond" are, in Keats's phrase, their own excuse for being -
heartrending beauty.  You wouldn't think an old chestnut like "Loch Lomond"
had anything new to tell you, but Vaughan Williams brings out its very deep
beauties - the ones that custom has caused most of us to skip over.  The
composer forces you to listen again.

Britain has been particularly blessed in the high quality of its small
vocal ensembles.  The first group of note, the English Singers, encouraged
by its very existence a flowering of other such groups dedicated mainly
to the Tudor madrigal.  However, the English Singers were never simply
an antiquarian outfit.  They sought out repertoire from contemporary
composers, and to them we owe many works by Vaughan Williams, Holst, Finzi,
Bax, and so on.  They toured throughout Europe and may have spawned the
Boulanger madrigal group.  For certain, they influenced the music and
compositional outlook of Bohuslav Martinu, who heard them in Prague and was
inspired to a new kind of counterpoint.  The Deller Consort was firmly in
that tradition.  Alfred Deller, of course, almost single-handedly revived
the counter-tenor voice and stimulated new interest in that repertoire.  He
was one of the principals in the modern Purcell revival, for example.  Now,
of course, we have our pick of counter-tenors, any one of which - from the
standpoint of vocal beauty - could sweep Deller off the stage.  Deller's
voice took some getting used to, but he was a superb singer.  His phrasing
and sense of line, his command of dynamics from anywhere within a phrase,
amounted to absolute.  For me, he's one of the great singers of the
previous century.  His Consort recorded not only English madrigal
masterpieces, but French, Italian, and German ones as well.  Later groups
like the Elizabethan Singers, the Purcell Singers, the Wilbye Consort, and
the King's Singers may have produced a more suave and beautiful sound
(Deller's voice to some extent grated against his colleagues', although
he blended better as he went along), but they don't communicate any more
deeply.  Furthermore, they all owe something to the Deller Consort's
example.

The performances here count as some of the best work the Consort ever did.
This is, in fact, a classic album. I'd snap it up before it goes out of
print.

Steve Schwartz