When a young man’s thoughts turn to travel
mainFrom the year’s closing Lebrecht Album of the Week:
At the turn of the 20th century, the world was wide open to young man of means. Ships were getting faster, trains more frequent and motor cars were appearing on the roads. Faced with these exciting possibilities, the English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams decided to stay home…
Read on here.
And here.
“James Gilchrist’s new interpretation is notable for its lack of sentimentality, recapturing the individuality of a young man’s struggle from external agendas of national identity, as pressing now as they were a century ago.” A striking sentence and indeed very true for our own time. It may be that a lot of unresolved problems of the early 20the century, both in general and specifically in culture, are still with us, because of the brutish intervention of the 1st world war and its aftermath. In music, the early 20C was the last peak of musical culture, in terms of creation, the downward slope of which extended till WW II. RVW has been looked down upon for a long time since William Glock, but the qualities of his work survived it and may enjoy a revival. Hopefully this CD will contribute to that revival.