Vaughan Williams' Lively Settings of John Skelton

Ralph Vaughan Williams' best known homage to the Tudor period is probably the Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis, a soaring, spiritual work that is a cathedral in sound. Much more earthy is the set of Five Tudor Portraits, settings of verses by the 16th century poet John Skelton.

Make no mistake, the music of the Portraits is entirely a pleasure to hear, a superb achievement by a huge, idiosyncratic talent in the prime of his career. (The work was written in 1936.) As for the verse, Skelton was a writer of prodigious talent and little discretion, both apparent in the works that Vaughan Williams set.

While Skelton was a most important poet, he also was a most intemperate one. A man of the upper class, he studied at Oxford and Cambridge, became a tutor to Henry VIII and eventually a cleric. He possessed a remarkable facility with words, which he used for purposes that encompassed burlesque and invective. We encounter both in the Five Tudor Portraits.

Perhaps the best known of the Portraits is "The Tunning [i.e., Brewing] of Elinor Rumming," a wild, misogynistic take-down of a possibly real alewife (that is, brewer) who was fined for shorting her clientele. Skelton goes to great lengths to express his disgust with Rumming, with overly vivid descriptions of her grotesque appearance to accusing her of plunking bird droppings in her libations to intimations of witchcraft.

The other major Portrait is that of that of "Jane Scroop (Her Lament for Philip Sparrow)," a 21-minute disquisition in verse about the death of a pet bird. Both it and Vaughan Williams' music are ingenious - and the words are touching - but did this small sorrow require an orchestra and chorus?

A third is "Epitaph on John Jayberd of Diss," in which Skelton makes known his distaste for the late Jayberd, "suspected by all, loved by none," in a sort of quasi-Latin verse that I could not understand, my last Latin lesson having occurred some 60 years ago. There is a free translation in the text booklet.

More to my taste is the simple song, "My Pretty Bess" and the concluding "Jolly Rutterkin."

Ralph Vaughan Williams

Vaughan Williams' settings are, as always, glorious sounding, as are the performances by some of the best that Britain had to offer in 1969, the time of the recording. This is one of a series of HMV choral recordings made in the 1960s and conducted by David Willcocks, as here, or Sir Adrian Boult. All posts were taken from original pressings and possess exceptional sound.

John Carol Case, Elizabeth Bainbridge, David Willcocks

The primary soloist is contralto Elizabeth Bainbridge, who some reviewers found much too ladylike for Elinor Rumming. (Probably true, but perhaps just as well.) Baritone John Carol Case is excellent in "My Pretty Bess." Willcocks brought in his Bach Choir for this outing, and they do fine, although again, some would have liked them to be more earthy. The New Philharmonia Orchestra sounds splendid in the comfy acoustic of Kingsway Hall.

While this is not my favorite of the Vaughan Williams choral works, I will say that the music and performance are hard not to enjoy, even for someone out of sympathy with one of the most famous poets of the English language.

November 1969 Gramophone ad