-The Film Music of Vaughan Willams Vol 1 (Incls 'scott of the Antarctic' & 'Coastal Command Suite')

'Rumon Gamba's performances are excellent and the fine sound is exactly what one anticipates from this Manchester BBC venue.'
Hi-FI News 'Record of the Month'

'Rumon Gamba secures exemplary results from his assembled forces… and the recording is spectacularly truthful to match. I'm already impatiently awaiting Volume 2.'
Gramophone

'…a full-blooded performance by the BBC Phil on cracking form.'
Classic FM Magazine

This release is part of Chandos' highly successful film music series and is the first of three volumes of Vaughan Williams's music for the cinema.

Some of the music of Vaughan Williams's greatest film score, Scott of the Antarctic, was truncated in the film and has not previously been heard in full. Some music cues were not used at all. This recording is therefore of immense historical as well as cultural significance, because for the first time it is possible to appreciate the scale of Vaughan Williams's achievement and understand why he re-worked the Scott score as the basis of his Seventh Symphony, Sinfonia Antartica.

The greatest and most ambitious of Vaughan Williams's film scores was for Scott of the Antarctic. On receiving the commission he read all the books he could find about the ill-fated 1911-12 expedition and became increasingly distressed to discover how inefficiently it had been organised and how lives had been risked and lost unnecessarily. Before Vaughan Williams had even seen a film script he had composed much of the score. Generous as was the amount of music eventually used, the film still contained less than half of what he had composed: 462 bars out of the autograph full score's 996 (although sections were used more than once, the result of skilful editing).

Hearing the film score in full for the first time brings home to the listener how the music is not only marvellously illustrative but also has a deeper spiritual element. Vaughan Williams uses Scott's journey to the Pole as a symbol of man's courage in the face of implacable nature. The great striving theme with which the film (and symphony) begin, is a kind of leitmotiv for Scott himself. Vaughan Williams originally envisaged a tragic ending but the director insisted on an upbeat finish in keeping with the projection of Scott as a national hero. It is significant that Sinfonia Antartica, the work for which this film score formed the basis, ends with the bleakness of the Antarctic landscape.

The other two pieces on this disc, Coastal Command and The People's Land, were scores for documentaries. Coastal Command reported on the wartime work of the Sunderland and Hudson flyingboats as they patrolled off Iceland and in the North Sea in search of German raiders. The People's Land described the work of the National Trust. Chiefly based on folksongs, Vaughan Williams's continuous score, cut for the film, is available here in full for the first time.