Take a walk any time of year in England\u2019s green and pleasant and, unless you\u2019re very lucky, you will soon sink up to the shinbone in what is known as a cowpat. These things are so prevalent they have even given rise to a genre of \u2018cowpat music\u2019 \u2013 works that express a quintessential Englishness with an ineradicably odiferous aftertaste. The term is usually credited to the crabby, atonal and determinedly unpopular composer Elizabeth Lutyens.<\/p>\n\n\n
Ralph Vaughan Williams was the grand master of cowpat music, able to evoke in one line of music five centuries of timeless pastorality. His Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis can be made to sound as close to kitsch as an Ealing comedy. On the other hand, a committed conductor can tease out unsuspected shades and ripples, turning the score into something like a Turner landscape.<\/p>\n
John Wilson has an uncanny ability to make familiar music sound fresh with his sinfonia of London. In this compilation album, he delivers a compelling reading of the Tallis Fantasia and an even more imposing account of Edward Elgar\u2019s Introduction and Allegro for strings \u2013 the most illuminating I have heard since the overwhelming John Barbirolli recording a good 60 years ago. How Wilson gets his violins to sound at one moment like a string quartet and the next like a church organ is one of the mysteries of musical transmission. On this form, he has the best strings sound in Britain.<\/p>\n
In between the two masterpieces are a concerto for string orchestra by Herbert Howells (whose \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0estate subsidised this album) and an impressionistic essay on Late Swallows by Frederick Delius. Neither has legs enough to support a tea-table, but the outer works are simply magnificent \u2013 not to be missed.<\/p>\n
NL<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Take a walk any time of year in England\u2019s green and pleasant and, unless you\u2019re very lucky, you will soon sink up to the shinbone in what is known as a cowpat. These things are so prevalent they have even given rise to a genre of \u2018cowpat music\u2019 \u2013 works that express a quintessential Englishness<\/p>\n