RaLPh Vaughan Williams: Music For Two Pianos Including The Fifth Symphony

Description

This Albion Records world premières album is the last recording made by the celebrated piano duo Goldstone and Clemmow. Recorded in St. John the Baptist Church, Alkborough, North Lincolnshire, in 2016, it comprises revelatory piano arrangements of Vaughan Williams's Fifth Symphony, The Running Set and Tallis Fantasia.

The Fifth Symphony was begun in 1938 and published in 1943. So it is clearly not a "war symphony" nor yet (despite what some suggested at the time) was it the vision of Peace Eternal in the midst of conflict. Like each one of RVW's symphonies it was a new exploration, a work complete in itself; but some of its roots can be found not only in the series of works that the composer derived from Bunyan's novel A Pilgrim's Progress, but also in the more violent Fourth Symphony and even in A London Symphony.

Michael Mullinar (1895-1973), a student of Vaughan Williams at the Royal College of Music in the 1920s, transcribed and arranged many of Vaughan Williams's works. The revisions indicate that the two-piano score is a work of collaboration between Mullinar and Vaughan Williams. Anthony Goldstone died soon after making this recording, which was the last made by him and his wife Caroline Clemmow after more than a third of a century of making music together. They have been described by Gramophone as "a dazzling husband and wife team" and by International Record Review as "a British institution in the best sense of the word".

Reviews

Those who see a message in the music about eternity will hear it unequivocally in the piano transcription of the Fifth Symphony (the disc also contains a dazzling performance of a transcription of the equally mystical Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis). The way the composer lays one texture on top of another does not always come out well in the orchestration: on two pianos, nothing remains unsaid. I now for the first time comprehend the true greatness of his Fifth Symphony, thanks to this interpretation: and see that it is very nearly his greatest work of all. --Simon Heffer, The Daily Telegraph, 3 December 2016

RVW's heart-warming inspiration is marvellously served on this occasion by Anthony Goldstone and Caroline Clemmow. The experienced husband-and-wife duo lend equally idiomatic and bracingly articulate advocacy to the two-piano arrangement by Vally Lasker and Helen Bidder of the sprightly 1933 dance medley The Running Set...Maurice Jacobson's sympathetic reworking of the Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis was published in 1947, and I'd take these artists' ideally cogent and passionate view over a goodly number of orchestral rivals. Excellent sound and balance, too, the results always firmly focused and truthful in timbre...Anthony Goldstone passed away on January 2, 2017, aged 72. This nourishing Albion release stands as a worthy memorial to his sterling musicianship. --Andrew Achenbach, Gramophone Magazine