NOTED MUSICIAN’S BIRTHDAY

Bay of Plenty Times, Volume LXXVI, Issue 14572, 16 January 1948, Page 6

NOTED MUSICIAN’S BIRTHDAY

VAUGHAN WILLIAMS NOW 75 BRITAIN'S MOST DISTINGUISHED COMPOSER The BBC has been celebrating the birthday of Vaughan Williams and it is difficult to think of Britain's most distinguished composer as a man of seventy-five. His strong bulky figure, his fine, reflective face, his air of country solidity—-all repudiate the bald factualities of chronology. Ralph Vaughan Williams is today an active, hardworking creative artist, who has recently completed his Sixth Symphony, and is also engaged on other important works. In his study, as in his garden, in Surrey, England, he goes steadily and regularly to work, unhurried, indifferent to his fame, genially gruff and unflattcrable. As a composer he has always gone his own way. His early enthusiasm was for folk-music, but his work cannot be readily classified into stylistic periods. Nature and mysticism have always attracted him. The work with which he first evoked more than passing attention way a choral work, “Toward the Unknown Region.” a setting of verses by AValt Whitman, a poet to whom he has gone more than once for inspiration. The work was heard in 1907, when the composer was 85. The next important work was also choral, “A Sea Symphony,” the words again by Whitman. The “Fantasia on a Theme by Tallis” and “Five Mystical Songs” have been described as possessing “an ethereal quality not heard before in British music.” The “Tallis” is perhaps his best-known work on the European Continent, and it is one that European conductors are fond of incuding in their programmes. Other famous works followed and four years age the Fifth Symphony appeared, the slow movement of which is one of the loveliest things written in this century. What the Sixth will tell us wo must wait to hear, in 1948. The greatest living figure—and the most English—in the music of Great Britain has an abhorrence of fuss and publicity, which is as English as his well-known composition, “On Wenlock Edge.” He has a countryman’s humour too. Once after a rehearsal of his Fourth Symphony he muttered to the orchestra as he prepared to go, “if this is modern music, I don’t like it.” But the intensely individual art of Vaughan Williams embraces all aspects of life. The order of Merit which was bestowed on him in 1935 represented worthy official recognition. The growing affection for the man and his music—at the age of 75 —is the heartfelt and grateful response of the music-loving public whom he has constantly enriched by his creative power and unflinching integrity.