Ralph Vaughan Williams – Serenade

The album takes its name from Serenade to Music, transcribed here for organ by David Briggs and recorded on the Willis organ of Truro Cathedral. David also gives us quite an astonishing transformation of the March Past of the Kitchen Utensils from The Wasps.

We hear premiere recordings of a Flourish for Three Trumpets and Four ‘Cambridge’ Flourishes for Four Trumpets, played by members of Tredegar Town Band, and we hear the whole band later in an arrangement of Two Carols made by Paul Hindmarsh using Vaughan Williams’s harmonies.

There are three folk songs from Albion’s Complete Folk Songs series – but these are new recordings for this album, each of the three soloists singing a folk song previously recorded by one of the others.

Lynn Arnold and Charles Matthews reprise the early Suite for Four Hands on One Pianoforte, with the original version of the Minuet. Charles Matthews goes on to play organ arrangements of three works by Vaughan Williams.

We conclude with a hymn tune that Vaughan Williams named after his cousin and best man, Ralph Wedgwood, known to his friends as Randolph – set to words that Vaughan Williams salvaged from a Moody and Sankey hymn: God be with you till we meet again.

Serenade is a mixed bag of an album, and is both a celebration of a great anniversary and a further contribution to Albion’s rich harvest of lesser-known works and new (and old) arrangements.