THAT SWEET CITY: Leighton – Veris Gratia Op.6, Vaughan Williams – An Oxford Elegy Choir of The Queens College, Oxford & Owen Rees

• Kenneth Leighton (1929 - 1988): Veris gratia, Op. 6:
• 1 Leighton: Veris gratia, Op. 6: I. Prelude 02:10
• 2 Leighton: Veris gratia, Op. 6: II. Aubade 03:16
• 3 Leighton: Veris gratia, Op. 6: III. Lament 05:25
• 4 Leighton: Veris gratia, Op. 6: IV. Elegy 03:14
• 5 Leighton: Veris gratia, Op. 6: V. Eclogue 03:16
• 6 Leighton: Veris gratia, Op. 6: VI. Paean 03:14
• 7 Leighton: Veris gratia, Op. 6: VII. Hymn to Cypris 04:13
• 8 Leighton: Veris gratia, Op. 6: VIII. Erotikon 01:59
• 9 Leighton: Veris gratia, Op. 6: IX. Nocturne 03:49
• 10 Leighton: Veris gratia, Op. 6: X. Epilogue 08:17
• Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872 - 1958): An Oxford Elegy:
• 11 Williams: An Oxford Elegy 22:45
• Total Runtime 01:01:38

Info for THAT SWEET CITY: Leighton – Veris Gratia Op.6, Vaughan Williams – An Oxford Elegy

This recording pairs a work by one composer – Kenneth Leighton – who was in the first flush of his creative career with a work by the senior figure in English music – Ralph Vaughan Williams – who was approaching the end of his life. The two pieces are linked by the circumstances of their first performance and by their connections to Oxford and to The Queen’s College. The works both received their premieres at Queen’s, in the college music society’s summer concerts of 1951 and 1952 respectively. One – the cantata Veris gratia – was composed by Leighton when he was still an undergraduate student at the college, while the other – An Oxford Elegy – belongs to the last period of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s long career: he was 79 when he attended the première. Although both are evocations of the pastoral and the bucolic, Leighton’s work celebrates young love in spring and summer through the hedonistic poetry of the medieval Carmina Burana (Leighton studied Classics at Queen’s), while Vaughan Williams’s is filled with nostalgia for an idyllic past, evoked through the poetry of Matthew Arnold. Stylistic threads nevertheless link the works, since Leighton at this early stage in his creative life was strongly influenced by the school of English composition within which Vaughan Williams was a seminal figure.

Rowan Atkinson, narrator
Nick Pritchard, tenor
Choir of the Queen’s College, Oxford, Choir
Britten Sinfonia, Orchestra
Owen Rees, director

No biography found.

Booklet for THAT SWEET CITY: Leighton – Veris Gratia Op.6, Vaughan Williams – An Oxford Elegy