Ralph Vaughan Williams: modernist master

To look at a picture of Ralph Vaughan Williams is like contemplating an image of a mountain. Not the elegant, keen-eyed Edwardian intellectual whom we sometimes glimpse on CD sleeves or in concert programmes; I’m thinking of the portraits from the last decade of his long life. By the 1950s ‘RVW’ had been the father of British music for so long that he already seemed like part of the landscape, and he looked it too. The craggy jowls, the weathered thatch of grey hair; that questioning gaze — and beneath it all, those great, tumbling scree slopes of rumpled tweed.

In his 150th anniversary year he’s still there, towering in the middle distance of national memory. Looking at the anniversary programming, you wouldn’t necessarily think that anything special had been planned. There’s a symphony cycle in Manchester; Job in Liverpool; and the Sinfonia Antartica in Glasgow. In London and elsewhere there are performances of his Sea and London symphonies, as well as the explosive Fourth and the radiant Fifth. Plus, of course, many, many outings for that unlikely national favourite The Lark Ascending, by groups ranging from the community-based Suffolk Philharmonic to the decidedly chic Britten Sinfonia.

True, these are uncertain times, and the picture beyond July is largely unconfirmed (the Vaughan Williams Charitable Trust will announce further events on 26 February). But otherwise this is pretty much what you’d expect, anniversary or not. Vaughan Williams is a fixture in British concert halls, and the Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis and The Lark Ascending (now in its second decade at the top of Classic FM’s annual audience poll) are established classics. There’s even been a mini-backlash. The Guardian has deplored the ‘Brexity’ audiences that love this music, and we’ve seen the emergence of a weird strain of inverted snobbery that assumes that if a masterpiece as subtle as The Lark (surely the supreme instance of a virtuoso showpiece that dazzles with gentleness rather than fireworks) becomes popular, it must therefore be populist.