Ralph Vaughan Williams Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis

This masterpiece has haunted me for a very long time, and I never tire of it. I realise this piece has received ample coverage here, but I wanted to include it in my coverage of the English pastoral composers. I leave it to Rob Young to elucidate: The Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis is time travel enacted in music; a temporal bridge between the Tudors and the modern Edwardians. It operates in space as well as time. Vaughan Williams divided the string section into two blocs which throw callandresponse repetitions at each other as if from either side of the choir stalls. A quartet occasionally rises up, but in the opening bars all are united, drawing a veil of mystic chords around the listener. Tallis s lines are furtively picked out in the lower register, and then all strings rhapsodically sing the tune in one of the composer s most lustrous, luminescent pieces of writing. Recurring throughout is an ascending phrase in the Phrygian mode a scale Vaughan William