The sacred music of Ralph Vaughan Williams is made problematic by the fact that he was, in the words of philosopher Bertrand Russell, a "confirmed atheist." However, to use the elegant phrase of annotator Ceri Owens, he "embraced the church as a place where a broad populace might regularly encounter a shared cultural heritage." That embrace took two forms, ably explored here by conductor Andrew Nethsingha (whose renown has advanced to a point where his surname can be used by itself on the cover as a selling point). The ...
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The sacred music of Ralph Vaughan Williams is made problematic by the fact that he was, in the words of philosopher Bertrand Russell, a "confirmed atheist." However, to use the elegant phrase of annotator Ceri Owens, he "embraced the church as a place where a broad populace might regularly encounter a shared cultural heritage." That embrace took two forms, ably explored here by conductor Andrew Nethsingha (whose renown has advanced to a point where his surname can be used by itself on the cover as a selling point). The first, exemplified by the Mass in G minor of 1921, involved an essentially personal response to Christianity, stimulated partly by Vaughan Williams' experiences on the battlefields of World War I, and partly by a mystical streak in his personality that manifested itself as well in nonreligious works. This Mass was shaped by the growing awareness of English Renaissance polyphony, but it fuses that in a unique way with the Impressionist-inspired harmonies of Vaughan Williams' early career....
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