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The Story of a Flemish Farm is an orchestral suite by British composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, based on the score for the 1943 film The Flemish Farm - a wartime drama set in occupied Europe, and written when Vaughan Williams was 70.
The score comprises seven movements, which follow the flow of the story:
The music takes themes from a number of folk tunes, along with references to A Sea Symphony of 1909 and his 6th Symphony, which followed in 1947. [1]
Vaughan Williams conducted the suite himself at a Promenade concert in July 1945, though he remarked that to call anything a suite was 'to damn it to extinction'. [2] Christopher Thomas, writing in a record review, commented: "The bold strength of the melodic writing is highly idiomatic and reflects VW at the height of his creative powers shortly before the works that were to form the symphonic "Indian Summer" of his later years." [3]
The film score was recorded by the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Muir Mathieson [4] and the suite has also been recorded by the RTÉ Concert Orchestra under Andrew Penny, and by the BBC Philharmonic under Rumon Gamba.
| Opera | |
|---|---|
| Ballet | |
| Orchestral works |
|
| Concertante | |
| Chamber music | |
| Choral music | |
| Vocal music | |
| Incidental music | |
| Film scores |
|
| Other compositions | |
| Namesakes | |
| Related articles | |
Ralph Vaughan Williams, was an English composer. His works include operas, ballets, chamber music, secular and religious vocal pieces and orchestral compositions including nine symphonies, written over sixty years. Strongly influenced by Tudor music and English folk-song, his output marked a decisive break in British music from its German-dominated style of the 19th century.
The Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra (BSO) is an English orchestra, founded in 1893 and originally based in Bournemouth. With a remit to serve the South and South West of England, the BSO is administratively based in the adjacent town of Poole, since 1979.
Sir Harold Malcolm Watts Sargent was an English conductor, organist and composer widely regarded as Britain's leading conductor of choral works. The musical ensembles with which he was associated included the Ballets Russes, the Huddersfield Choral Society, the Royal Choral Society, the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company, and the London Philharmonic, Hallé, Liverpool Philharmonic, BBC Symphony and Royal Philharmonic orchestras. Sargent was held in high esteem by choirs and instrumental soloists, but because of his high standards and a statement that he made in a 1936 interview disputing musicians' rights to tenure, his relationship with orchestral players was often uneasy. Despite this, he was co-founder of the London Philharmonic, was the first conductor of the Liverpool Philharmonic as a full-time ensemble, and played an important part in saving the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra from disbandment in the 1960s.
Symphony No. 5 in D major by the English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams was written between 1938 and 1943. In style it represents a shift away from the violent dissonance of his Fourth Symphony, and a return to the gentler style of the earlier Pastoral Symphony.
Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, also known as the Tallis Fantasia, is a one-movement work for string orchestra by Ralph Vaughan Williams. The theme is by the 16th-century English composer Thomas Tallis. The Fantasia was first performed at Gloucester Cathedral as part of the 1910 Three Choirs Festival, and has entered the orchestral repertoire, with frequent concert performances and recordings by conductors and orchestras of various countries.
Sir Charles Barnard Groves CBE was an English conductor. He was known for the breadth of his repertoire and for encouraging contemporary composers and young conductors.
Gordon Percival Septimus Jacob CBE was an English composer and teacher. He was a professor at the Royal College of Music in London from 1924 until his retirement in 1966, and published four books and many articles about music. As a composer he was prolific: the list of his works totals more than 700, mostly compositions of his own, but a substantial minority of orchestrations and arrangements of other composers' works. Those whose music he orchestrated range from William Byrd to Edward Elgar to Noël Coward.
Serenade to Music is an orchestral concert work completed in 1938 by English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, written as a tribute to conductor Sir Henry Wood. It features an orchestra and 16 vocal soloists, with lyrics adapted from the discussion about music and the music of the spheres from Act V, Scene I from the play The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare. Williams later arranged the piece into versions for chorus and orchestra and solo violin and orchestra.
The Symphony No. 4 in F minor by Ralph Vaughan Williams was dedicated by the composer to Arnold Bax.
Sinfonia antartica is the Italian title given by Ralph Vaughan Williams to his seventh symphony, first performed in 1953. It drew on incidental music the composer had written for the 1948 film Scott of the Antarctic.
Ralph Vaughan Williams's Symphony No. 8 in D minor was composed between 1953 and 1955. Sir John Barbirolli, its dedicatee, conducted the Hallé Orchestra in the premiere at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester on 2 May 1956. It is the shortest of the composer's nine symphonies, and is mostly buoyant and optimistic in tone.
Five Variants of Dives and Lazarus is a work for harp and string orchestra by Ralph Vaughan Williams. The composition is based on the folk tune "Dives and Lazarus", one of the folk songs quoted in Vaughan Williams' English Folk Song Suite.
John Wilson is a British conductor, arranger and musicologist, who conducts orchestras and operas, as well as big band jazz. He is the creator of the John Wilson Orchestra and Associate Guest Conductor of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra.
Sea Songs is an arrangement of three British sea-songs by the English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams. It is based on the songs "Princess Royal", "Admiral Benbow" and "Portsmouth". The work is a march of roughly four minutes duration. It follows a ternary structure, with opening material based on "Princess Royal" and "Admiral Benbow", with "Portsmouth" forming the central section before a return to the opening material featuring the first two songs.
Rumon Gamba is a British conductor. He studied music at Durham University, and then went to the Royal Academy of Music in London, where he studied conducting with Colin Metters, George Hurst and Sir Colin Davis. He became the first conducting student to obtain the DipRAM. He was a 1998 prize winner in the Lloyds Bank BBC Young Musicians Conductors Workshop. In 1998, he joined the BBC Philharmonic as its Assistant Conductor, and later became Associate Conductor. He left the orchestra in 2002.
Martin Yates is a British conductor. He was born in London. After attending Kimbolton School (1969–1974), he studied at the Royal College of Music and Trinity College of Music, London, where his teachers included Bernard Keeffe (conducting), Richard Arnell (composition), Ian Lake, Jakob Kaletsky and Alan Rowlands (piano), and Douglas Moore and John Burden.
The Flemish Farm is a 1943 British war film, based on an actual wartime incident. Released during the war and used as a propaganda tool to support the Allied war effort, the film begins with the caption:
The Norfolk Rhapsodies are three orchestral rhapsodies by Ralph Vaughan Williams, drafted in 1905–06. They were based on folk songs Vaughan Williams had collected in the English county of Norfolk, in particular the fishing port of King's Lynn in January 1905. Only the first rhapsody survives in its entirety, having been revised by the composer in 1914. The second exists in fragmentary form, and has been completed by other hands. The third is lost.
John Hollingsworth was a British orchestral conductor prominent in the concert hall, the ballet and opera theatre, and the film studio. He was Sir Malcolm Sargent's assistant conductor at The Proms, where he conducted over 60 times including some world and British premieres. He also conducted at the Royal Opera and Sadlers Wells, and became associated with music for British horror films of the 1950s and early 1960s.
