Chapter 10 - Performance

Summary

‘You can’t place too much store on what’s written down’ (conductor Martyn Brabbins, interviewed in September 2020). This chapter highlights performance issues and philosophies that have arisen from conducting the music of Vaughan Williams. As Hugh Cobbe has noted, ‘the manuscript was merely the first stage for Vaughan Williams’, but for those proceeding beyond that stage, his scores make significant interpretational demands. This is partly due to Vaughan Williams’s (arguably quite generous) attitude to performers, and particularly the agency that his scores give to musicians to make their own choices. Some of the issues raised by Sir Adrian Boult in his correspondence with Vaughan Williams are used as a starting point for interviews with present-day conductors: Martyn Brabbins, Sir Andrew Davis, David Lloyd Jones, Sir Roger Norrington, Christopher Seaman, and John Wilson. Performance for all the musicians interviewed here is about the agency given to performers to explore the ‘inner workings that are often hidden’, the ‘kernel’, and their ‘instinctive reaction’, a position that contrasts greatly with the far more prescriptive notation of other British composers such as Elgar or Britten.