Scenes from a life x3: A trio of British composers are reborn in masterly, moving documentaries.

Heavenly Twins: Vaughan Williams’ Fifth and Sixth prove two sides of a classy coin.

The conductor talks about his recording of Vaughan Williams' Fifth and Sixth Symphonies with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, Limelight's Recording of the Month in July.

Brabbins croons a wonderful Foggy Day in London town.

Sir Andrew Davis plays it cool in Antarctica.

Five in harmony as FS Kelly joins the Brits.

An outstanding Vaughan Williams from Emma McGrath and the TSO to bid farewell to the 2017 season.

Chris van Tuinen and Gladys Chua will escape from a prison into the open air in four uniquely site specific concerts. Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from $4 per month Subscribe Already a subscriber? Log in

If you’ve ever wondered why you’d never heard of Vaughan Williams’ keyboard music, you might find the answer in these well-performed examples by the excellent British pianist Mark Bebbington. It’s important to hear the full range of any great composer’s music, and Discoveries, recently reviewed in Limelight, brought us some of his unheard orchestral works. It’s wonderful music, hidden away for decades. But that is orchestral music, of which the composer was a master.The piano, being a percussion instrument simply cannot release the Vaughan Williams magic. It works a treat for Beethoven, but is relatively alien to the misty loveliness of Vaughan Williams. Two works for solo piano, A Little Piano Book and Suite of Six Short Pieces, are pleasant, but not much more. Of sterner stuff is the Introduction and Fugue for two pianos, a first recording; at 17 minutes it has some substance. The Lake in the Mountains is claimed to be a masterpiece, and is possibly the best piece on the disc. However, it descends into musical head-banging with a great deal of thumping, not a style I associate with the composer. The arrangements of his more famous pieces, such as the Tallis Fantasia… Continue reading Get…

Weymark’s new and old English masterworks bridge the centuries.

The second release in Andrew Manze’s complete traversal of Vaughan Williams’ symphonies, is as impressive as its predecessor. Despite the name “Pastoral”, the Third was a wartime symphony. Parts were written while Vaughan Williams was stationed at Écoivres during World War I, and its elegaic, melancholy mood is directly related to that experience. Manze’s recording embraces a post-war reading of the work in one very specific way: he employs a tenor for the wordless vocalise in the final movement, rather than a soprano. The ghostly sound of a man’s voice produces an almost tangible link to the unknown soldier that came to represent the casualties of the Great War. And how deeply contemplative is Manze’s pacing of the magical orchestral passage following the tenor’s appearance? The Fourth, composed between 1931 and 1934, seems with its harsh harmonic clashes to represent the threat of war once more, but the composer indicated that his point was purely musical. This was his first symphony to follow a traditional, recognisably symphonic form, namely that of Beethoven’s Fifth. Manze treats it that way. His urgency and clarity point out the symphony’s structural coherence, helped by a fresh and open sound. Manze reveals… Continue reading Get…

Brett Weymark enjoys exploring the ripe choral masterpiece that the Countess of Albermarle pronounced "disgusting".