Vaughan Williams - Music for Strings

RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS

String Music:

Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis

Concerto grosso

Partita for Double String Orchestra

London Philharmonic Orchestra- Sir Adrian Boult



Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, also known as the Tallis Fantasia, is a work for string orchestra by the British composer Ralph Vaughan Williams. It was composed in 1910, and performed for the first time in September of that year at Gloucester Cathedral for the Three Choirs Festival. Vaughan Williams himself was the conductor on this occasion, and the composition proved to be a major success. He revised the work twice, in 1913 and 1919. Performances of the work generally run between 14 and 16 minutes.

The work takes its name from the original composer of the melody, Thomas Tallis (c.1505-1585). Vaughan Williams took much inspiration from music of the English Renaissance and many of his works are associated with or inspired by the music of this period.[2] In 1906 Vaughan Williams included Tallis's Third Mode Melody in the English Hymnal, which he was then editing, as the melody for Joseph Addison's hymn When Rising from the Bed of Death.

The work is scored for an expanded string orchestra divided into three parts: orchestra I, a full-sized string orchestra; orchestra II, a single desk from each section (ideally placed apart from Orchestra I); and a string quartet. Vaughan Williams makes this configuration resemble an organ in sound, with the quartet representing the swell division, orchestra II the choir division, and orchestra I the great division.

In structure this piece resembles the Elizabethan-age "fantasy." The theme is heard in its entirety three times during the course of the work, but the music grows from the theme's constituent motives or fragments, with variations upon them. A secondary melody, based on the original, is first heard on the solo viola about a third of the way into the Fantasia, and this theme forms the climax of the work about five minutes before the end.