It was an inspired move by Chandos to issue this wallet set of
their three definitive RVW film music CDs. It’s a slim box - capacious
enough to take three stiff card sleeves and three booklets looking
as if they might have been gathered from stocks intended for the
individual discs. There is in fact a difference: the three separate
booklets carry the number of the box but otherwise they appear
to be identical to those that came with the jewel case originals
issued steadily between 2002 and 2005. While true enthusiasts
may well have no need for this box having bought the full price
discs when they first came out many others will be pleased to
add rising four hours of new or newly polished RVW in inspiring
and powerfully vivacious sound: nine scores in total - three on
each of the three discs.
Everything is
most handsomely done. Recording quality is well up to the
usual Chandos gold standard. The booklets are very desirably
designed and include stills from the films. The annotation
is thorough and Michael Kennedy is the author. There are also
comments from a key player in this project, Stephen Hogger
who has done so much precise and practical work in editing
and preparing scores and performing materials. His attentive
hand is in evidence for seven of the nine scores represented
here and those seven all receive premiere recordings. Also
at the crux of the whole Chandos British film music series
are the intrepid BBC Philharmonic and Rumon Gamba. In fact
only a handful of the Chandos film series have used other
orchestras and conductors.
There is great variety
in this set and many unfamiliar moments. Take volume 1 and
the music for Scott of the Antarctic. Ship's Departure
(tr.5) is marked by a Sally Army 'tin tabernacle' recessional.
This is followed by the shiver and chill of the ice floes
with chortling cor anglais. Several moments recall Holst's
Planets. Ten of the eighteen Scott tracks are world
premiere recordings. The Coastal Command suite is colourfully
despatched. The music is familiar both from Silva Screen and
Marco Polo. No such familiarity in the case of the 13 minute
single movement revival of RVW's music for The People's
Land - a celebration of the work of the National Trust
and through its love affair with landscape a natural for Vaughan
Williams' pastoral vein. Rather a pity that this score is
in a single compacted rhapsodic movement. It would have been
good to be able to tie in the music with the scenes portrayed:
Dover, Lake District, West Wycombe, Bodiam Castle, cliffs
and pastures, lakes and sea visions. The film was made in
1942 with commentary by Freddie Grisewood. The music is full
of folk references and one of the most glowing of these relates
to the composer’s opera Sir John in Love.
Onwards to Volume 2.
The 49th Parallel music is varied and proves rewarding
well beyond the wonderful Prelude. The film tells the
tale of a Nazi U-boat crew stranded in Canada and trying to
make it to the then neutral USA. There’s more than whiff of
propaganda about it – nobility too. RVW essays music for native
American Indians across three tracks. Gamba rather hurries
along the Prelude and closing titles just a shade too rushed
for my liking; I need something a shade more sentimental.
While many tracks are signature RVW several are not. They
would make good quiz material. Try the oompah ball dance for
Winnipeg II.
Dim Little Island
is a lovely sequence
of continuous music which is classically pastoral and tenderly
evocative. This 1949 ‘short’ by the Central Office of Information
was designed as a rejoinder to the suggestion that four years
after the war England was slipping into mediocrity. The Variants
on Dives and Lazarus is used in extenso and the
folk song itself is sung by Martin Hindmarsh.
The England of Elizabeth
music will be known
to older collectors through the sequence that Previn recorded
in the late 1960s as an adjunct to his cycle of the symphonies.
The music was written at the same time as the Eighth Symphony
and also makes play with an extended percussion section as
can be heard in Treasures. The Stratford movement
is a gem with its opening harp ostinato and lyric English
string theme recalling the great melody in the Sixth Symphony’s
first movement. The extended suite used here is across five
movements. It is splendidly New Elizabethan in its antique
Tudor and pastoral-pensive moments.
The rarest material
is reserved for Volume 3. It is good to hear the music for
The Story of a Flemish Farm in such good sound at last.
Its pages include clear recollections or fore-shadowings of
Pilgrim’s Progress. Dawn in the Old Barn certainly
recalls in its cooling writing for flute The Shepherds
of the Delectable Mountains. The Loves of Joanna Godden
is once again in the single quarter hour sequence favoured
by Mr Hogger. It bubbles and sings in the full flood of English
pastoral mode. Bitter Springs is reflects a trek in
the Australian outback. The seething and threatening energy
of Vaughan Williams at his least avuncular is reflected in
the screeching Round-Up. This score can loosely be
grouped with that for anther Australian epic of the post-war
era: Ireland's The Overlanders which has been truly
splendidly done recently by John Wilson and the Hallé on Hallé
CD HL 7523.
Here is a stylish,
passionately engaged, instant, compact and economical way
of getting an appreciation of Vaughan Williams' ‘war work’
- as the composer termed it – as well as the scores he produced
in the late 1940s and early 1950s. I fervently hope that Chandos
will give us the complete incidental music he wrote for the
BBC adaptation of Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge and
then turn to the composer’s other music written for radio
productions.
Rob Barnett
Links to reviews of separate volumes in Chandos RVW film series:
Vol. 1
RB
IL
IL
Vol. 2
CT
CT
Vol. 3
CT
GD
IL
Merryn Gamba (soprano)*, Jonathan Scott (organ)*, Sheffield Philharmonic
Chorus*, Emily Gray (soprano)>, Martin Hindmarsh (tenor)+ 
