PCO Presents The Lark Ascending
Premiered 3 pm, Sunday, September 13, 2020
Today’s Program
Welcome by Maestro Attar
Interview with James Lyon, violin soloist and PCO concertmaster
Ralph Vaughan Williams - The Lark Ascending
Closing comments by Larry Mroz, PCO Board President
Program Notes
Ralph Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending was composed as a response to George Meredith's poem of the same name and the composer copied its lines describing the bird's "silver chain of sound" on the fly-leaf of his score. Vaughan Williams was on holiday on the coast in Margate in Kent on the day Britain entered the First World War. The resort was not an embarkation point, but ships were engaging in fleet exercises. The composer later told the story that the tune came into his head as he walked the cliff, at which point he jotted down the notes. A young scout then made a citizen's arrest, assuming he was scribbling details of the coastline for the enemy.
When Vaughan Williams enlisted in the army in 1914, after the outbreak of World War I (he was forty-one at the time), he set the score aside. The experience of serving in the war—he was an orderly with the Royal Army Medical Corps in France and then an officer—seems only to have heightened his nostalgia for a simpler time and for a world that no longer existed. It isn’t surprising then, that shortly after he came home in 1919 he picked up The Lark Ascending, lovingly fine-tuned it, and eventually orchestrated it as a touching souvenir of a time gone by
A revised version of the work was completed in Bristol in 1920 with the help of the English violinist Marie Hall and a full orchestral version was first played in London on June 1921, under the baton of the renowned Adrian Boult.
Vaughan Williams prefaced his score with these lines from Meredith’s poem:
He rises and begins to round,
He drops the silver chain of sound,
Of many links without a break,
In chirrup, whistle, slur and shake.
For singing till his heaven fills,
’Tis love of earth that he instils,
And ever winging up and up,
Our valley is his golden cup
And he the wine which overflows
to lift us with him as he goes.
Till lost on his aërial rings In light,
and then the fancy sings.
Program notes by Conductor Laureate, Douglas Meyer.
Video produced by CW Studios.
