Ralph Vaughan Williams' Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis is one of his best known works, and Tudor church music was a major influence on the composer. During 2008 I am playing all the Vaughan Williams symphonies on my Future Radio programme , and this Sunday (Feb 17) it is the turn of the Eighth Symphony. This for many, including me, is one of his finest works, and it certainly destroys the myth of the composer as a backward looking English pastoralist, with its scoring for vibraphone, xylophone, tubular bells, glockenspiel and three tuned gongs. I'm coupling all the Vaughan Williams Symphonies with choral music from Thomas Tallis . This will be taken from the splendid new 10CD box of Tallis' complete works at bargain price from Brilliant Classics sung by the Chapelle du Roi directed by Alistair Dixon . Tallis also composed a number of instrumental works which are included in the box. They are not of the same peerless quality as his choral works, but are, nevertheles...
Comments
It doesn't seem to have occured to anyone that the reason I embed links to other OAOP posts is to add value, and that I couldn't give a stuff where my blog appears in primacy tables.
Hyperlinks are the point of the internet guys.
"the refreshingly unselflinking Alex Ross"
Oh please, I'm starting a blog on rabbit breeding.
Oh please, I'm starting a blog on rabbit breeding.
Hahahahaha.
Yikes, my fellow Yanks. I've noticed that Americans in general have an amazing ability to leech every last bit of fun and interest out of things by turning them in to surrogate sporting contests, marketing opportunities or, more commonly, putting a dreary Puritanical gloss on them.
That's surely a joke, because if you took away Mr. Ross' links to his New Yorker articles, TRIN would be pretty thin gruel at times.
The Sounds & Fury ranking is a useful, but debatable, guide to the ranking of classical music blogs for those that need one.
But it may be worth considering that the apparent popularity of OAOP is due to the fact that readers actually like both the content and the embedded links, rather than being achieved by some cunning and arcane mathematical manipulation.