BY STEPHANIE ESLAKE
Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) is one of England’s most highly celebrated composers, known for his stunningly tranquil choral music and gorgeous symphonies. During his life, he experienced two World Wars – the first of which is honoured by Australia this year in the 100 year anniversary of its initial outbreak. Vaughan Williams was heavily influenced by his experiences during the war time, and respected British pianist and conductor Howard Shelley OBE shares with us the importance of the composer today in light of the war’s centenary.
Talk us through the significance of Vaughan Williams and his Pastoral Symphony today. What’s the story behind the work?
Vaughan Williams doesn’t tend to have stories to his works. He has backgrounds. He takes the chants of early music but he was writing in the 20th Century. A lot of composers at that time were looking back to earlier classic and pre-classic composers for an inspiration for a way forward, because the romantic music had run its course. The interesting thing is that at the moment, we are paying tribute to the start of the First World War. The Vaughan Williams Pastoral Symphony he wrote as a reaction to being in the army for the friends that he saw killed. When he was in the army, he would go up at night and look across these beautiful, tranquil fields that looked like an impressionist painting, then compare them with the ghastliness that he was dealing with – the bodies that would come back practically lifeless. It’s a lonely work and focuses on the tragedy of the war – not in any sort of violent way, but as his bittersweet memories of that picture that he saw of the land’s beauty untouched by the horror going on around it. The realities of life around Europe were changing so, and one of the ways the composers managed to deal with it was looking back to classical times – those less emotional ways of writing music. Yet, Vaughan Williams takes that classical music and uses it with beautiful sumptuous writing.
How is it that he achieves this tragic beauty through composition?
Many of his friends and other composers were killed in the war, and this is his reflection of it. It even has a trumpet at one stage who is practicing but doesn’t quite manage to make the top note of the scale. He uses that as a sort of thematic idea in the second movement. He starts the last movement and ends the whole symphony with this solo soprano voice without words.
Strings alone in an orchestra can sound absolutely beautiful – and he knows just how to use them. He divides them through three groups: a main group, then a smaller orchestra of strings which gives perspective of another voice behind the orchestra. Then, he uses a section of soloists which gives another quality of sound and timbre, and it works beautifully from that point of view. It’s tranquil and passionate and lonely and embracing, as good music should be. It provides you with extremes of emotion.
So can you get lost in this tranquillity, too? Or are you completely occupied with conducting the orchestra?
It’s a combination. If you have performed a work several times you can get more lost and allow yourself to get relaxed that much more. But when you’ve only got a few days of rehearsal before a performance – and it’s broadcast live – you can’t relax as much. The orchestra will need me and need to have a clear idea of what I’m trying to get from them all, and the conductor’s job is to draw all of the orchestral players into one voice, and form an interpretation. They could all interpret the work individually and do a very good job of it, but one has to find an interpretation which helps them to play their best. So, I won’t be completely relaxed, but on the other hand, conducting music of this nature with a world class orchestra is an experience which daily gives me huge pleasure, and I revel in it
You often play the piano while conducting – surely it’d be hard to relax when responsible for both?
Strangely, it’s more relaxing sometimes than having a conductor as a third party. It’s lovely to go directly to the musicians who are accompanying you, and they like it too- to have that direct contact with the soloists, because its’ very immediate. It’s really a bit like chamber music on a larger scale, which is what we’re always aiming for in music. To sound intimate and homogenous.
Howard Shelley will conduct the Vaughan Williams Pastoral Symphony along with Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis and other works by Mozart when the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra performs on May 23 at the Federation Concert Hall. For more information go to www.tso.com.au.
For more information on how the First World War affected music of the time, check out our story on wartime composers: https://www.cutcommonmag.com/wartime-composers-ww1-100th-anniversary/
Image supplied.
