Exploring the CD Collection, #2

I've been trying to decide which CD of mine -- out of the multitudes -- I wanted to discuss next in this sporadic series, but then I heard a bit of news on the classical station while driving home that made it pretty much of a no-brainer.

Violinist and conductor Iona Brown has died.

Brown was very closely associated with Sir Neville Marriner and his orchestra, the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, and I have a number of recordings of Brown in action with that very ensemble, including a set of Mozart's violin concertos that I admire greatly. But no recording of Marriner's and Brown's is more prized in my collection than this collection of music by Ralph Vaughan Williams, a recording which I prize in turn for the presence on it of the finest performance I have ever heard of what I consider to be Vaughan Williams's masterpiece, "The Lark Ascending".

I first heard this work live, at a concert given in Buffalo's Kleinhans Music Hall by the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra. I don't recall who the violinist was, but the piece struck me a serious blow. I had never before encountered the English pastoral tradition in music to that point, and it was shocking to me. Never had I heard music of such gossamer tranquility, music that seemed to me the musical equivalent of one of those Japanese paintings in which four or five lines in black ink on white paper somehow manage to depict a flower in blossom. And yet, "The Lark Ascending" isn't merely just a fifteen-minute work of tranquility and softness: there is melody and development within it, and Iona Brown's performance on that CD is absolutely captivating.

Incidentally, after reporting Iona Brown's death, WNED played this very recording of "The Lark Ascending" on the air, with the announcer reporting that today is actually the seventy-third anniversary of the work's premiere (in its more-familiar orchestral version).

The CD also includes a lush recording of Vaughan Williams's famous "Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis", a fine "Fantasia on 'Greensleeves'", and closes out with "Five Variants of 'Dives and Lazarus'". This CD is as fine a disc as I own, in any musical genre.