At Bard, a Festival Argues for the Music of Vaughan Williams

Perhaps more music festivals should open with a singalong.

At the start of the first concert of the Bard Music Festival on Friday, at the Fisher Center in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., a thronging audience was, shall we say, encouraged to join the Bard Festival Chorale in a rendition of “Come Down, O Love Divine,” one of the hymns that Ralph Vaughan Williams set as part of his efforts to enliven the music of Anglican worship. The tune, named “Down Ampney” after the Gloucestershire village in which this English composer was born in 1872, is simple, elegant and, as it turns out, satisfying to warble your way through.

That was, largely, the point. Vaughan Williams and His World, the 33rd Bard festival, argued during its first weekend that he was a composer who intended his art to be of use, who saw his search for beauty through music as a collective and communal act, who wrote not only for himself, but also for his time, his place, his countrymen.

“The composer must not shut himself up and think about art,” he wrote in 1912. “He must live with his fellows and make his art an expression of the whole life of the community.”

But does this music have anything to say now? After all, even some of Vaughan Williams’s staunchest advocates feared for the future of his music while he was still alive. “The human as well as esthetic aspects of Vaughan Williams’ art, and its nearer relation to contemporaneous society” than that of Sibelius, might age it more quickly, the New York Times critic Olin Downes critic predicted four years before the composer’s death in 1958.

Some of Vaughan Williams’s works do still speak today, above all the remarkable triptych of symphonies through which he seemed, despite his protests to the contrary, to encase the carnage of his era in sound: the biting, terrifying Fourth, a sour reminder of the Great War that had its premiere in 1935; the uneasy, bleak Sixth, finished in 1948 and an immediate sensation; the desperate yearning of the wartime Fifth, his insistent declaration that a better world was still possible. While others may think of the Fifth as naïve, I find it almost Brahmsian in its consolation and sincerity.

But as Vaughan Williams’s supporters often point out, he composed in such a range of forms and styles that even if one of his scores falters at the ear, there is a decent chance that another will break through. Don’t like the Vaughan Williams of “The Lark Ascending”? Try Vaughan Williams the urbane Neo-Classicist, or Vaughan Williams the mordant modernist — or so the argument goes.

For the conductor Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College and one of the festival’s leaders, sustaining eclectic listening is practically a reason for living. And the Bard Music Festival excels at that. Not only does this year’s iteration argue for Vaughan Williams himself, but with the assistance of a phalanx of academics led by two scholars in residence, Byron Adams and Daniel M. Grimley, it laudably brings to life a musical culture that normally receives no attention outside Britain, and precious little even there.

It was particularly heartening to see programmed alongside Vaughan Williams the music of, among others, Ethel Smyth, Rebecca Clarke and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, whose Clarinet Quintet astonished in a fine performance by Todd Palmer and the Ariel Quartet. These composers, long excluded in the name of prejudice, are featured matter-of-factly, as if they had always appeared on concert bills.

If anything, Vaughan Williams got a little lost in the bravura breadth of the programming on the first weekend, though he is less likely to after the second, which will feature an exceedingly rare production of his Falstaff opera, “Sir John in Love,” the “Sinfonia Antartica” and the Symphony No. 8, as well as a smattering of works for smaller ensembles. Of the six concerts I heard, one surveyed the popular music of Vaughan Williams’s time, with which he appeared to have barely a tenuous connection, while two were dedicated to his scores alone.

Three other performances roamed the contexts in which he worked, and they were outstanding, an ideal fusion of intellectual insight and musical integrity. The first, introduced by the musicologist Eric Saylor, sketched out the dominance of Brahms in turn-of-the-century British composition, through Parry, Stanford, Bruch and the like; another, with winking commentary from Adams, looked at art songs. The third investigated the fraught relationship between Britain and France at either side of World War I, focusing on the influence of Ravel on Vaughan Williams during their lessons in 1907 and ’08. As the tenor Nicholas Phan, the pianist Piers Lane and the Ariel Quartet showed with a cutting “On Wenlock Edge,” a cycle of Housman poems that Vaughan Williams completed in 1909, the Englishman was no copycat, but he learned much from Ravel about how to refine a mood.

Young artists excelled in all these concerts, not least the pianist Michael Stephen Brown, whose poised refinement made an early student piece by Smyth, her Sarabande in D minor, sound like a mature masterpiece. The players of The Orchestra Now, a training ensemble at Bard, played creditably in the two concerts that they contributed to as well.

But in those, alas, the old Botstein dilemma came to the fore. The conductor bows to nobody in his zeal for neglected art, nor in the taste for intellectual provocation that was amply on show in remarks here, but he can lack the insight and technique that would allow the overlooked truly to shine.

Such was most detrimentally the case in a program that tried to present Vaughan Williams as an experimentalist, through three works from the late 1920s and early 1930s: “Job,” the terse “masque for dancing” (that is, ballet) that was inspired by the illustrations of William Blake; the unwieldy, postwar revision for two pianos of the awkward Piano Concerto in C, valiantly tackled by Lane and Danny Driver; and the Fourth Symphony. The readings were competent, to be sure, but not specific enough in their details, especially in the Fourth, which plodded along rather than piercing the air. The edge that makes these works so bold was blunted, the intellectual argument softened.

But Vaughan Williams, at least, still had something to say.