Composer of the Week: Vaughan Williams

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Composer of the Week

Music: Classical

Composer of the Week - Brand

An informative guide to composers' lives and their music.

An informative and accessible guide to composers' lives and their music.

Composer of the Week: Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958): Toward the Unknown

Toward the Unknown

Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958)

BBC Radio 3 - Composer of the Week, Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958), Toward the Unknown

Donald Macleod explores how faith shaped Vaughan Williams’s life and music.

Donald Macleod explores how Vaughan Williams’s ideas about faith changed during his life, and how faith shaped this avowed atheist’s life and music.

Ralph Vaughan Williams is one of Britain’s most loved composers, and best-known symphonists, writing nine symphonies that span almost 50 years of his career. These works evoke a wide range of moods, each creating its own unique world, from his first stormy choral symphony, through the aggressive and the tranquil, to his final enigmatic, haunting Ninth. Over the course of this week, Donald Macleod delves into the life and work of Vaughan Williams - a man who helped forge a new identity for English music in the 20th century - paying special attention to the symphonies. Vaughan Williams’s father was a vicar, but Ralph himself was an avowed atheist. In the final programme of the week, Donald explores how Vaughan Williams’s own ideas about faith changed during his life and how this shaped his life and music. We’ll be hearing from two Vaughan Williams symphonies – his Seventh, “Sinfonia Antartica”, and his final statement in the form, the Ninth.

Come down O Love Divine (Down Ampney)
Choir of Trinity College Cambridge
Richard Marlow (chorus master)
Christopher Allsop (organ)

Sinfonia Antartica - Intermezzo (with introductory lines)
Timothy West (narrator)
Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra
Andrew Manze (conductor)

Hodie (This Day) - No Sad Thought His Soul Affright
Guildford Choral Society
St Catherine’s School Choir
Hilary Davan Wetton (conductor)

Songs of Travel - 1. The Vagabond, 6. The Infinite Shining Heavens, 9. I have trod the upwards and the downwards
Bryn Terfel (bass-baritone)
Malcolm Martineau (piano)

Symphony No 9 - IV. Andante tranquillo
London Philharmonic Orchestra
Adrian Boult (conductor)

Five Variants of Dives and Lazarus
London Symphony Chorus
London Symphony Orchestra
Richard Hickox (conductor)

Producer: Sam Phillips

Composer of the Week: Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958)

Live music and the arts: broadcasts more live music than any other radio network. Classical music is its core. Genres include world and new music, jazz, speech and drama.

Donald Macleod looks at the life and work of English composer Vaughan Williams.

Donald Macleod looks at the life and work of a man who helped forge a new identity for English music in the 20th century, paying special attention to Vaughan Williams's symphonies.

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Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958)

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