From The Archives

This month's edition of BBC Music magazine is the annual one that ties in with the upcoming season of Proms concerts. One of the two items on the free cover disk is a vintage live recording from the Last Night way back in 1953. It features the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the BBC Chorus conducted by Basil Cameron performing Serenade To Music by Vaughan Wiliams. The text is taken from Shakespeare's Merchant Of Venice when Lorenzo extols the virtues of music. It was commissioned as a celebration piece and is a little soft centred, maybe the closest that Vaughan Williams came to an establishment work in an Elgarian vein. The orchestral playing holds up very well for the vintage but the singing by the BBC Chorus is almost as period in style as the contemporary plum voiced BBC continuity anouncer introducing the disk from the archives. The other work on the disk is another live recording but from Maida Vale not from the Proms. This has Sir Adrian Boult conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra in Vaughan Williams's Pastoral Symphony. I already have a commercial recording of this major symphony which I have already posted about, suffice it to say that I don't think that these days there is any need to explain and defend Vaughan Williams against cowpat charges. Anyone listening to the work and hearing a simple evocation of English rural bliss clearly isn't listening closely enough.