A London Symphony

Vaughan Williams Listening Challenge, and a streaming recommendation

Our last couple of weeks have featured major works by RVW from the period after his service in the First World War. This week we go back to right before the war’s outbreak in 1914, when Vaughan Williams premiered his London Symphony, which was his second (his first having been the choral Sea Symphony). This is brighter and optimistic music than his later symphonies, bursting with great tunes, and invoking the spirit of a bustling city, with moments of calm and wonder. There are programmatic elements (the bells of Westminster, for example), but they are not distracting. The slow movement is RVW at his most lyrical, and to describe the closing of the finale, the composer cited H.G. Wells’s novel Tono-Bungay:

Light after light goes down. England and the Kingdom, Britain and the Empire, the old prides and the old devotions, glide abeam, astern, sink down upon the horizon, pass. The river passes, London passes, England Passes. (From the CD booklet of the Manze recording)

And the symphony ends quietly. Our recording is Andrew Manze’s with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic.

Our second piece this week is near and dear to my heart, because I performed this song cycle when I was a young voice major at the University of North Carolina, along with a friend who played the oboe. In Ten Blake Songs, RVW takes ten poems from the poet’s Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience and sets them for tenor and oboe. The results are brooding and beautiful. Our recording features tenor Mark Padmore and Oboist Nicholas Daniel.

Here are links to our playlist on Apple Music and Spotify:

RVW Listening Challenge Playlist on Apple Music

RVW Listening Challenge Playlist on Spotify

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Presto Music

This week I have a recommendation for those of you who are frustrated with streaming options for classical music and jazz. A couple of years ago, when Apple bought the Primephonic streaming service and promised to launch a new classical app, the future seemed bright, but the app, when it arrived, was something of a disappointment. While it did improve the search and organizational functions, it lacked a number of features important to classical listeners—such as the ability to download music and to view CD liner notes.

Some of you have asked me where I acquired my modest musical knowledge, and to be honest, much of it has come from decades of reading the liner notes of CDs and records. This is one big reason that I recommend Presto Music. Presto is an English retail outlet that has built its business by selling traditional physical media, primarily CDs, and so they understand how important program notes are to serious listeners, and they make them available for every recording. (I found the quotation above describing the finale of A London Symphony in the liner notes provided by Presto.)

The primary reason that I recommend Presto, however, is that it provides much better remuneration for musicians than do the big streaming services. They also employ an in-house editorial team for interviews with musicians and articles. So real musicians and music journalists take priority over the tech overlords.

Here is what the app looks like on my iPhone. I love how it gives all the musician credits right there on the screen:

Also, you can download music in hi-res (not that I can tell an audible difference between hi-res and CD-quality, but it’s nice to have all the same; in any case, it certainly beats Spotify’s characteristic compression).

Fair warning: there is no pop music, so I also subscribe to Apple Music. For me it’s worth it to have both, but your mileage may vary.

Here is a link to Presto Music in case you want to give it a try. They offer a month-long free trial for their service.

That’s all for today. Thanks for reading, from my fancy internet phone to yours.

Photo by Wilhelm Gunkel on Unsplash