Vaughan Williams Listening Challenge: A Fantasia and a Phantasy

Bird-Bolts and Cannon-Bullets, No. 32

To go along with our LOTR Reading Challenge over the next nine weeks, we are launching our second listening challenge. This one will be a bit different from the first, which featured multiple recordings of a single work (Beethoven's Eroica). We will instead concentrate on a series of works by a single composer over the next nine weeks to serve as musical accompaniment to our reading: Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958). Each week, we will add two pieces to our RVW playlist, one of his famous works and another, lesser known work. See below for links to the playlist.

Some of you will know that I feel that Tolkien and Vaughan Williams resonate with each other as artists and as contemporaries, though I do not know whether they were familiar with each other’s work. I made my case for this connection in this piece:

The focus of the above essay is RVW’s Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, which was composed for a first performance at Gloucester Cathedral in 1910. A hundred years later, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, under the baton of Sir Andrew Davis, played the Fantasia in the same space—a majestic performance, which you may view here:

I had a difficult time choosing a recording for the playlist, because there are so many good ones. My favorite is probably a classic performance by Constantin Silvestri and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, but I ended up choosing Robert Spano and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra because of its superior sound quality. If you want to do more of a deep dive, I can also recommend the Silvestri recording, as well as recordings by John Barbirolli, Adrian Boult, The Orpheus Chamber Orchestra (no credited conductor), Andrew Manze, and Leonard Slatkin. If you have other favorites, please drop them in the comments.

Our second work by RVW this week is much less well known but is very beautiful: the Phantasy Quintet, written in 1912 for string quartet plus an additional viola. It has a pentatonic, folk sensibility, which is characteristic of much of RVW’s early music. There are far fewer recordings of this than of the Fantasia, but my favorite of the bunch remains the first that I heard, the Maggini Quartet with Garfield Jackson playing the additional viola.

A YouTube search yielded this gorgeous live recording from 2020 by Daishin Kashimoto, Natalia Lomeiko, Yuri Zhislin, Joaquin Riquelme Garcia, and Claudio Bohorquez, recorded at the International Chamber Music Festival at Salon de Provence:

Here are links to our RVW Listening Challenge Playlist on Apple Music and Spotify:

RVW Listening Challenge Playlist on Apple Music

RVW Listening Challenge Playlist on Spotify

Let me know in the comments what you think of the music, and also whether you used it to accompany your reading of Tolkien.

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The Stack of the Week

PCF had fewer than a hundred subscribers when I first launched The Stack of the Week back in August of 2023. The first stack that I featured was Homo Vitruvius by

A. Jay Adler

, who is, quite simply, a great writer—one of the finest that I know. It has been a great pleasure getting to know Jay (from a distance) over the ensuing months, and I hope that some day we can meet in person. He is always required reading, whatever he is writing about, because you are guaranteed a fresh, deeply thoughtful perspective, completely free of cliché or pandering. There are so many pieces that I could recommend, but I will limit myself to two. First, his reassessment of Hemingway (the first of two parts):

"Hemingway" in the Twenty-First Century

And here is the first part of his compelling account of his journey to California as a teenager in 1969:

California Dreamin’ [From the Archives]

Behind the paywall, you will find lots of treats that are worth far more than the price of admission: his Magellanic Diaries, which chart his research for the novel that he is currently working on, and his series of “Extraordinary Ordinary People.” His archive is a treasure trove; dig in anywhere.

That’s all for today. On Wednesday, we will reconvene for week two of the LOTR Reading Challenge. Read through the second chapter of Book Two, “The Council of Elrond.”

Thanks for reading, from my fancy internet typewriter to yours.

Photo by Yusuf Evli on Unsplash