Composer of the Week: Vaughan Williams Today

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Composer of the Week

Music: Classical

Kate Molleson

An informative guide to composers' lives and their music.

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

Composer of the Week: Vaughan Williams Today: Personal Difficulties

Vaughan Williams Today

Personal Difficulties

BBC Radio 3 - Composer of the Week, Vaughan Williams Today, Personal Difficulties

Donald Macleod explores Vaughan Williams’s troubles during the early 1930s.

Donald Macleod explores the difficulties which blighted Ralph Vaughan Williams during the 1930s, and the music that arose from the frustration he felt.

This month, Donald Macleod takes a fresh look at one of Britain’s most popular composers, Ralph Vaughan Williams, as part of Radio 3's 'Vaughan Williams Today' season - marking the 150th anniversary of the composer’s birth. Alongside programmes which delve into Vaughan Williams's life story and music in fascinating depth, over the course of four weeks and twenty programmes, Donald will also be talking to some of the leading authorities on Vaughan Williams to share and explore share new perspectives on a variety of overlooked and less well known aspects his life and work, forming a comprehensive and absorbing portrait of a composer whose body of work has had such an enduring imprint on British cultural life.

In the third week of this landmark series, Donald will focus on the years 1931-1947, a dramatic period in not just Vaughan Williams’s life, but in the wider world too, encompassing the second World War. Vaughan Williams was 67 when Britain and France declared war on the Reich, so too old for active service, but he threw himself into contributing wherever he could to the war effort. Musically, this was another period when the composer suffered from a crisis of failing inspiration and creative drought as the political turmoil deepened around him, but it would also give rise to some of his finest music, including three of his best regarded Symphonies – numbers 4, 5 and 6. 

In Monday’s programme, Donald explores the series of difficulties which blighted Vaughan Williams’s personal life during the early 1930s, and music which arose from the frustration he felt at these issues, combined with his anxiety at the troubles of the wider world in this period of ominous political uncertainty and change.

Vaughan Williams
Into the Woods my Master Went
Robert Court (organ)
Cardiff Festival Choir
Owain Hughes (director)

Vaughan Williams
Fantasia on Greensleeves
Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra
Andrew Manze (conductor)

Vaughan Williams
Piano Concerto in C major - I. Toccata; II. Romanza
Louis Lortie (piano)
Toronto Symphony Orchestra
Peter Oundjian (conductor)

Vaughan Williams
Symphony no. 4 in F minor – III. Scherzo; IV. Finale con epilogo fugato
BBC Symphony Orchestra
Martyn Brabbins (conductor)

Vaughan Williams
The Running Set
London Symphony Orchestra
Richard Hickox (conductor)

Producer: Sam Phillips

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 takes a fresh look at the composer's life in his 150th anniversary year.

As part of Radio 3's season marking the 150th anniversary of Ralph Vaughan Williams's birth, Donald Macleod takes a fresh look at one of the UK's most significant musical figures.

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