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drplaceboIt's Forgotten Masterpiece Friday!
This week, we'll hear from Grace Williams (1906-1977), the earliest noteworthy composer to come from Wales. Born at exactly midnight on February 20, 1906 (her date of birth is sometimes listed as February 19), Grace Williams was raised in a family of amateur musicians. Her father, the director of an amateur choir, did not believe in teaching music theory to his children through traditional textbooks and exercises. He simply opened his library of music scores to his eldest daughter and allowed her to explore at her leisure, which contributed to her idiosyncratic style and rather unconventional career progression in music.
Williams attended University College Cardiff on a scholarship, but found the music program stifling; at the first opportunity she moved on to the Royal College of Music in London, where she began to achieve recognition as a composer under mentorship of Ralph Vaughan Williams. She won a scholarship to study in Vienna for a year; true to her free-spirited nature, she said later that she learned more from attending concerts and operas "almost every night" than from formal study. On returning to London, Williams accepted a succession of teaching positions while composing prolifically. Her Fantasia on Welsh Nursery Tunes, composed in 1941 and still her best known work, was broadcast by the BBC, and was so well received by listeners that it was recorded by the London Symphony Orchestra.
At the time, although she often composed on Welsh themes, Williams tended toward a rather conventional late-Romantic style; her own idiosyncratic style began to blossom only after her return to Wales in 1947. While in London, she had often been in poor physical health, and the deprivations of the Second World War compounded her frequent illnesses. In 1944, she resigned from a teaching position in London after being hospitalized for "exhaustion" and decided to stop composing entirely. In 1946 she accepted less strenuous work writing scripts for BBC music programs, but as her health problems persisted, she resigned abruptly after nine months and moved to the Welsh coast. Her timing was fortuitous: she returned to Wales just as the BBC Welsh Orchestra was revived after a wartime hiatus and less than a year after the foundation of the Welsh National Opera. As perhaps the only Welsh composer of note, Williams had a surprisingly good year financially in 1947; BBC Welsh Orchestra director Mansel Thomas programmed several of her earlier works in 1947-48, which led to further commissions. At this point, already in her 40s, Williams began to find a new musical voice heavily influenced by the old Welsh traditions of poetry, oratory, and ballad singing. The strict rules of Welsh vocal improvisation became the basis for her own versions of classical forms. Although some of her earlier music remains more frequently performed, most of Williams's large-scale works come from the last thirty years of her life.
Williams's Violin Concerto, composed in 1949-50, was one of the first pieces in her mature style. It had a successful premiere in 1950, but it did not begin to receive recognition as a significant British violin concerto until after its first recording in 2006. While firmly within the late Romantic harmonic idiom that the composer used throughout her career, the entire concerto is written almost as if it were an extended improvisation. It begins rather strikingly, with a leisurely, rhapsodic slow movement in the style of Welsh penillion singing. The second movement is also slow, and based on a Welsh hymn tune that is again treated in quasi-improvisational manner. The Allegro con spirito third movement, though more structured, still features an extended, virtuosic cadenza.
Movements:
I. Liricamente
II. Andante sostenuto (9:14)
III. Allegro con spirito (16:01)
This week, we'll hear from Grace Williams (1906-1977), the earliest noteworthy composer to come from Wales. Born at exactly midnight on February 20, 1906 (her date of birth is sometimes listed as February 19), Grace Williams was raised in a family of amateur musicians. Her father, the director of an amateur choir, did not believe in teaching music theory to his children through traditional textbooks and exercises. He simply opened his library of music scores to his eldest daughter and allowed her to explore at her leisure, which contributed to her idiosyncratic style and rather unconventional career progression in music.
Williams attended University College Cardiff on a scholarship, but found the music program stifling; at the first opportunity she moved on to the Royal College of Music in London, where she began to achieve recognition as a composer under mentorship of Ralph Vaughan Williams. She won a scholarship to study in Vienna for a year; true to her free-spirited nature, she said later that she learned more from attending concerts and operas "almost every night" than from formal study. On returning to London, Williams accepted a succession of teaching positions while composing prolifically. Her Fantasia on Welsh Nursery Tunes, composed in 1941 and still her best known work, was broadcast by the BBC, and was so well received by listeners that it was recorded by the London Symphony Orchestra.
At the time, although she often composed on Welsh themes, Williams tended toward a rather conventional late-Romantic style; her own idiosyncratic style began to blossom only after her return to Wales in 1947. While in London, she had often been in poor physical health, and the deprivations of the Second World War compounded her frequent illnesses. In 1944, she resigned from a teaching position in London after being hospitalized for "exhaustion" and decided to stop composing entirely. In 1946 she accepted less strenuous work writing scripts for BBC music programs, but as her health problems persisted, she resigned abruptly after nine months and moved to the Welsh coast. Her timing was fortuitous: she returned to Wales just as the BBC Welsh Orchestra was revived after a wartime hiatus and less than a year after the foundation of the Welsh National Opera. As perhaps the only Welsh composer of note, Williams had a surprisingly good year financially in 1947; BBC Welsh Orchestra director Mansel Thomas programmed several of her earlier works in 1947-48, which led to further commissions. At this point, already in her 40s, Williams began to find a new musical voice heavily influenced by the old Welsh traditions of poetry, oratory, and ballad singing. The strict rules of Welsh vocal improvisation became the basis for her own versions of classical forms. Although some of her earlier music remains more frequently performed, most of Williams's large-scale works come from the last thirty years of her life.
Williams's Violin Concerto, composed in 1949-50, was one of the first pieces in her mature style. It had a successful premiere in 1950, but it did not begin to receive recognition as a significant British violin concerto until after its first recording in 2006. While firmly within the late Romantic harmonic idiom that the composer used throughout her career, the entire concerto is written almost as if it were an extended improvisation. It begins rather strikingly, with a leisurely, rhapsodic slow movement in the style of Welsh penillion singing. The second movement is also slow, and based on a Welsh hymn tune that is again treated in quasi-improvisational manner. The Allegro con spirito third movement, though more structured, still features an extended, virtuosic cadenza.
Movements:
I. Liricamente
II. Andante sostenuto (9:14)
III. Allegro con spirito (16:01)