This piece was only a name to me until I signed up for Bristol Choral Society’s Come and Sing, which this year featured the music of Vaughan Williams. It’s a ‘song’ for choir in a genre which has now gone out of fashion: a setting of a poem for chorus and orchestra lasting about 10 minutes. (Blest Pair of Sirens. which you also don’t hear very much these days, is another example.) It’s an early work, mixing some rather four-square material with more harmonically daring passages.
Over 200 of us gathered at Tyndale Baptist Church, a handsome building notable for its stained glass windows (it’s a pity though that the lovely central east window can no longer be illuminated by natural light). Our other piece was the Mass in G minor. I’ve sung most possible bits of this over the years: first and second soprano parts, and most of the solos. But I’m not very familiar with the second soprano line and I don’t think I’d ever sung the Creed, so I had some learning to do even in this much more familiar work.
At the end of the day we sang through both pieces with the piano impersonating the orchestra in Toward the Unknown Region and discreetly accompanying in the Mass (to avoid the loss of pitch which Vaughan Williams clearly anticipated to judge by his comments in the score).
We were told that Vaughan Williams has been a bit out of fashion recently, which may partly explain why there are many important choral works by him that I’ve never sung: the Sea Symphony (this may change soon, though), Hodie, Dona Nobis Pacem, Sancta Civitas, the Oxford Elegy and, astonishingly, his Fantasia on Christmas Carols. [2020 update: I’ve now done the symphony, Dona Nobis Pacem and the Fantasia.