The Lark Ascending
Jan 31st, 2009 by oldfogey
Vaughan Williams’ ‘The Lark Ascending’ is the most popular piece of classical music in England today. I say ‘England’ for it means nothing to the Welsh, and the Scots despise it. But its evocation of the beautiful English countryside (and there is none more beautiful), its nostalgia for that ‘England’ of the heart - a heaven that is England in all true English hearts - and its fragility are all the English would know. As if the flickering note of the bird might so easily be extinguished by some rude blast from the real world.
When I first came down to London, in the late 1960s, I lived in a one bedroom hovel in East London, whilst toiling daily trying to drum some appreciation of the finer things into the heads of the skinheads and bovver boys of Dagenham. An uphill struggle. I played this to them once. My classes were normally rowdy, but when they heard this you could hear a pin drop.
Hugh Bean plays it, with the New Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Sir Adrian Boult - the recording that quietened my noisy class.
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