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.