Editorial Review:Amazon.com:Marriner's evergreen 1972 recording of favorite shorter works by Vaughan Williams has yet to be surpassed for warmth of conception and smoothness of execution. The soloists in these accounts (among them William Bennett in the
Greensleeves Fantasia and Iona Brown in
the Lark Ascending) are all first-rate, and the Academy's strings play with polish and great beauty of sound. The analog recording is excellent, and Marriner's remarkable empathy for the music comes across effortlessly. Some listeners may prefer the richer sonority and arrestingly mystical manner of Marriner's 1993 digital remake of the
Tallis Fantasia for Philips, but this disc offers the most desirable coupling of other works and remains a first choice for those interested in getting to know the composer's finest short essays.
--Ted Libbey
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Related Items:
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Related Items:
Disc 1:- Fantasia On A Theme By Thomas Tallis
- Fantasia On Greensleeves
- The Lark Ascending
- Five Variants Of 'Dives And Lazarus'
Customer Reviews
Average Rating:
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Wonderful!
Everytime I purchase a CD through Amazon and its vendors, the service and content surprise me! When studying, the works inspire me!
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SUPERB!!!
This is a beautiful CD. Vaughn Williams is my favorite classical composer and Neville Marriner's interpretation of his music is perfect. All of the tracks on this CD are fabulous!
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Iona Brown was very special
The Iona Brown recording of "Lark" here is famous in Britain and justifiably so. Brown, who died in 2004, grew up in the English countryside and had a deep experience of what Vaughan Williams was trying to capture. The rest of the CD is lush, crisp and wonderful -- the Academy's renowned strings at their early 70s peak. It's an analog recording (1972) and the sound is terrific. I don't think this recording has ever been out of print -- how many thousands of us owned the LP and bought the CD as soon as it came out.
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Superb
This is an essential recording for any classical music collection. I've probably played this CD a thousand times, and I never grow tired of it. Wonderful music beautifully played - buy it.
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this England!
It is perhaps impossible to hear Vaughan Williams' short works performed more beautifully and unforgettably than in this 1972 ADRM/Argo recording. Neville Marriner and the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields acquit themselves above reproach. Vaughan Williams - you love him or hate him - must be loved for his Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, that haunting and almost religiously uplifting setting of Medieval plainsong that is capable of shifting a driver to the side of the road in open-jawed amazement at the sheer evocative beauty of it.
Greensleeves is emblematic of the English countryside and its melody, easily dismissed as the primped-up stuff of 'Rule Brittania' shops but so much more worthwhile than all that. Iona Brown's violin on 'The Lark Ascending' sounds as though crafted to play this piece once - enduringly- and then tossed like unused Eucharistic wine.
How, one wonders in aesthetic and rationally unguarded moments, could a nation that produced such music have lost an Empire? Or, more accurately, how could a people capable of such lyricism have done otherwise than believed - for an historical blink of an eye - in its own superiority?
That a coterie of *English* musicians should produce the definitive recording of these works is poetically appropriate.
That listeners of many tongues should listen and wonder at Williams' temperamental genius is simply a musical fact on the ground.
Begin Vaughan Williams with this recording. The rest are derivative.
