Vaughan Williams: The Lark Ascending - Lana Trotovšek

Lana Trotovšek, violin Slovenian Philharmonic Orchestra Ilan Volkov, conductor He rises and begins to round, He drops the silver chain of sound, Of many links without a break, In chirrup, whistle, slur and shake. For singing till his heaven fills, 'Tis love of earth that he instils, And ever winging up and up, Our valley is his golden cup And he the wine which overflows to lift us with him as he goes. Till lost on his aerial rings In light, and then the fancy sings. Among the enthusiasms of the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams were poetry and the violin. He had trained as a violinist as a boy, and greatly preferred the violin to the piano, for which he never had a great fondness. His literary tastes were wide-ranging, and among the English poets of the 19th and early 20th centuries whom he admired were Tennyson, Swinburne, both Rossettis, Hardy, Housman, and Meredith. Before the composition of The Lark Ascending Vaughan Williams had inscribed a verse by Meredith above an early score, now lost. The composer's second wife, Ursula, herself a poet, wrote that in The Lark Ascending Vaughan Williams had "taken a literary idea on which to build his musical thought … and had made the violin become both the bird's song and its flight, being, rather than illustrating the poem from which the title was taken". At the head of the score Vaughan Williams wrote twelve lines from Meredith's 122-line poem It is not known when and where Vaughan Williams composed the piece. The original manuscript has been lost. The soloist for whom the work was written and to whom it is dedicated was Marie Hall, a leading British violinist of the time, a former pupil of Edward Elgar, and celebrated for her interpretation of that composer's Violin Concerto. She worked with Vaughan Williams on the new piece before the premiere, and may have influenced some details of the score, though if so the extent is unknown. (source: wikipedia) http://www.hedonerecords.co.uk/   / borisbizjak     / boris.bizjak.5   Subscribe here: http://www.youtube.com/subscription_c...