Recent additions have included A Cambridge Mass by Ralph Vaughan Williams, and his alluring Pre-Raphaelite cantatas The Garden of Proserpine and Willow-Wood. Other titles by this great English composer can also be found in these pages, notably A Sea Symphony, the Five Mystical Songs and Fantasia on Christmas Carols. There are works by his friend Gustav Holst, including his masterpiece The Hymn of Jesus, the overture Satyricon, The Forgotten Rite and Mai Dun by John Ireland, and classics of English pastoral such as Frederick Delius’s On hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring. The spectrum of English opera ranges from the definitive edition of Purcell’s The Fairy Queen to Boughton’s The Immortal Hour, and there are songs, cantatas, anthems, orchestral music and concertos by Addison, Bainton, Bantock, Blow, Boyce, Bridge, Butterworth, Darke, Elgar, Jacob, Moeran, Stanford, S S Wesley and many others.
New works by Ronald Corp, Morgan Hayes, Thomas Hewitt Jones and Rhian Samuel bespeak a living tradition that complements this heritage in ways both entertaining and challenging. Meanwhile, the past yields further discoveries that are ‘new’ in the sense of enriching our awareness of its breadth and depth. There could be no more significant example of this than the original version of A London Symphony. Premiered at the Queen’s Hall just four months before the outbreak of the Great War, it is dedicated to the memory of George Butterworth, who encouraged Vaughan Williams to embark on a ‘real symphony’, and whose own complete orchestral works are also available from the Stainer & Bell hire library.
