Composer of the Week: Vaughan Williams Today

Original version

BBC Radio 3 is a radio channel that started transmitting on the 30th September 1967. It replaced Third Programme.

BBC Radio 3

Radio 3

Migrated podcast image for: Composer Of The Week

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: Turning Tides

Vaughan Williams Today

Turning Tides

BBC Radio 3 - Composer of the Week, Vaughan Williams Today, Turning Tides

Amid acclaim, Vaughan Williams suffers a creative block. Donald Macleod presents.

Donald Macleod explores how, just as Vaughan Williams was being hailed as Britain’s greatest living composer, he was suffering from a creative block. Donald Macleod presents.

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 the wake of the deaths of Elgar and Holst, Vaughan Williams was hailed as Britain’s greatest living composer. In Tuesday’s programme, Donald explores how, as he increasingly became the musical face of the establishment, Vaughan Williams became estranged from a younger generation of British composers. And as the wider world slides towards war, the composer suffers from a creative crisis.

Vaughan Williams
5 Tudor Portraits - V. Jolly Rutterkin
Henry Herford (baritone)
Guildford Choral Society
Philharmonia Orchestra
Hilary Davan Wetton (conductor)
		
Vaughan Williams
Two Hymn-Tune Preludes
Bournemouth Sinfonietta
George Hurst (conductor)
		
Vaughan Williams
Festival Te Deum in F
Christ Church Cathedral Choir, Oxford
English String Orchestra
Stephen Darlington (conductor)
		
Vaughan Williams
Riders to the sea – Act I: “…and may he have mercy on my soul”
Linda Finnie (mezzo-soprano)
Northern Sinfonia and Northern Sinfonia Chorus
Richard Hickox (conductor)

Vaughan Williams
Serenade to Music (Orchestral Version)
Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra
Andrew Manze (conductor)

Vaughan Williams
Epithalamion - The Lover’s Song
Philip Smith (baritone)
Joyful Company of Singers
Britten Sinfonia
Alan Tongue (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.

Accessibility links

Programme Index

Composer of the Week

Vaughan Williams Today

Turning Tides

Genres

Brand

Series

BBC Radio 3

About BBC Radio 3