Finn star: I’ll do Vaughan Williams in France
OrchestrasFrom an interview with Tarmo Peltokoski at the Granada Festival:
‘A personal passion of mine is the music of Vaughan Williams, the great English composer, which is not really played anywhere. So we shall be exploring that a little bit…’
He should play George Lloyds’s 12th Symphony, or Maxwell Davies’s 5th Symphony.
Both great works, but I still want my Vaughan Williams. And when will Bax get wider play?
On a program with Havergal Brian’s Second? Yes, please… the winds and brass would appreciate the gig!
RVW not played anywhere? In the early 1980’s his “Sinfonia Antartica” and the “Tallis Fantasia” were premiered in Puerto Rico, of all places. His take on “Greensleeves” is almost ritual Christmas fare here. His Oboe Concerto was recently given its local premier by our principal oboist and in the upcoming 2024-2025 season of the Puerto Rico Symphony Orchestra “The Lark Ascending” and his 5th Symphony (the one Aaron Copland famously felt was “like looking at a cow.”) will be performed here. And there is this wonderful video of Maestro Andrew Davis leading the Boston Symphony in that 5th Symphony… I take issue with the suggestion the RVW is, for all practical purposes, forgotten.
He didn’t say RVW is forgotten.
He said he was a fan of the RVW music that isn’t played anywhere… of which there is quite a bit.
A propos your headline: Fi(n)nster is the name of one of Big Dave’s cats.
Definitely a good idea and a change of Mahler symphonies…the 4 th could please the audience…or Antarctica. I am not a Makkela greatest fan, he has enough of them, but I am very grateful he programmed Waton’ Belshazzar Feast in Paris, it was bold.
Anyway, for the Toulouse audience, an interesting change from the Shostakovitch overdose they were force-fed with for the last eighteen years…