wp6988a8ec.gif

Programme Notes

RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS (1872-1958)

CONCERTO IN F MINOR FOR TUBA AND ORCHESTRA 1954

Allegro moderato

Romanza - andante sostenuto

Rondo alla tedesca

LESLIE NEISH, tuba

The tuba, largest of the valved brass instruments, is not familiar as a concerto instrument: it generally lends its magisterial weight to orchestral tutti and is used to wonderful effect if occasion demands. (In Wagner's Siegfried the tuba represents the dragon Fafner, groaning menacingly at the bottom of his cave.) And so when in 1954 the London Symphony Orchestra asked Vaughan Williams for a work to celebrate their fiftieth jubilee there was some surprise when he gave them a concerto for tuba -- a tuba in F, still used by some orchestral players in Britain but in the process of being supplanted by the E-flat instrument. Philip Catelinet, the LSO's tuba player, who still preferred the F instrument, was the first to perform the concerto.

Vaughan Williams was in his eighties when the work was written, but his energy was still prodigious, and he continued to conduct and to travel. He and his wife Ursula took a holiday that year in Italy where, she wrote in her biography of her husband, 'he throve on long walks and Chianti, on tiny cups of strong coffee and lemon water-ices, or cassata, on the wild strawberries packed in figure-of-eight shaped baskets and on sightseeing. His ankles,' she added, 'hardly ever ached.' He was now 82.

Moreover his creative imagination hardly seemed to have diminished. It was the year of his Three Gaelic Songs and his first violin sonata, and at this late stage of his long life he displayed a new curiosity towards unfamiliar instruments: to this period belong his Romance in D-flat for harmonica, strings and piano, written for Larry Adler, the Eighth Symphony with its prominent part for vibraphone, the Ninth Symphony featuring flugelhorn and three saxophones -- and the tuba concerto. All are the kind of composition that make what the late Hugh Ottaway called 'a unique contribution to the music of old age.'

In the tuba concerto Vaughan Williams gave himself the challenge of bringing into the limelight an instrument hitherto largely ignored, exploring its possibilities as a solo instrument. In the first movement he showed something of what the tuba could do technically, demonstrating its range and agility, although the mood of the music tends towards the goblin malice of, for instance, his fifth symphony. Part of Vaughan Williams' task was to contradict the idea of the tuba as a lumbering buffoon and to show that no less than the harmonica, it could take a romantic, lyrical rôle. Hence in the second movement, he assigns to the soloist the kind of tender, reflective sounds indicated by the title of Romanza.

The last movement, with the tuba 'surrounded by dancing strings,' suggested to Vaughan Williams' biographer Michael Kennedy 'Falstaff and the fairies in instrumental terms,' although the title of the movement indicates not so much the forest of Windsor in Shakespeare's Merry Wives as a rondo 'in the German style.' Vaughan Williams evidently wanted to convey the notion of a rondo in the style of a symphonic work by a German composer.

The concerto, which lasts a little more than twelve minutes, was first heard at the Royal Festival Hall on the 13th June 1954, the final concert of four to celebrate the London Symphony Orchestra's jubilee. The conductor was John Barbirolli, who recorded the concerto the next day, with the same orchestra, and the same soloist, Philip Catelinet. The concerto is dedicated to him.

Programme Notes by Paul Vaughan ©

 

The Wimbledon Symphony Orchestra is a registered charity (No. 259860)