Concerto Grosso

The Concerto Grosso by English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams was first performed at the Royal Albert Hall in London in November 1950. The work was commissioned by the the Rural Schools Music Association on the occasion of its Twenty-first anniversary. Vaughan Williams looks back to the traditional Baroque Concerto Grosso, finding it to be the solution to a major practical challenge in the particular commission. For the Albert Hall concert in question, he had at his disposal a small group of performers at higher level of proficiency, a larger group at an intermediate level, and an even larger group at a very basic level. Thus, the composer designated the first group as a 'concertino', the second into 'ripieno' according to the traditional practice with Concerto Grosso, and for the third group scored parts with the exclusive use of open strings which, according to the composer's instructions, can be omitted at libitum as will be the case tonight. The work represents a five-movement unit, where the central movement – Sarabanda (No. 3) coexists with the Burlesque (No. 2), Scherzo and March (Nos. 4,5). The composition opens and ends in an identical fashion, with a stately epigraph, which perhaps in this work embodies in a most typical way the style of the composer, where the grandeur of ancient church music, the unaffected beauty of the English folk song, the spirit of the time around the two world wars, and the unusual modesty in the character of the author crystallize into remarkably refined aesthetics, perhaps undervalued, but also seeming to occupy recently a better deserved place on the concert podium in his native country and around the world. This arch-like musical epigraph in the work seems to recall a refrain from the famous poetry of T. C. Elliott, from the Four Quartets, written in England about 10 years earlier – "In my beginning is my end."