Back to The Future (RVW)

We’re thrilled to see that our friends over at Dutton Epoch have released the world premiere recordings of Vaughan Williams’s The Future and The Steersman, boldly reimagined and completed by Martin Yates.

Dutton Epoch – CDLX7411
Lucy Crowe soprano
BBC Symphony Orchestra
BBC Symphony Chorus | Neil Ferris chorusmaster
conducted by Martin Yates

The Future is a substantial non finito draft of a major choral setting of words by Matthew Arnold, dating from 1908, immediately after Toward the Unknown Region, and in the crucial year of Vaughan Williams’s three-month tutelage with Ravel in Paris. Urgent ecological concerns – strikingly relevant today no less than in the Victorian period of unprecedented industrial expansion – propel the broad sweep of Arnold’s prescient account of mankind’s past and its uncertain hereafter. The prophetic tone draws on similar images of river, estuary and ocean that inspired the finale of A London Symphony. The Future is around 35 minutes’ duration, for solo soprano, chorus and orchestra, and it will without question be seen as an essential link in the evolution of VW’s embracing universal vision of humanity, expressed uniquely for all time in A Sea Symphony.