Like his Serenade to Music, Vaughan Williams's An Oxford Elegy is an inspired translation of favourite poetry into music. Passages from Arnold's The Scholar Gipsy and Thyrsis are extracted to form a deeply moving elegy for a vanished world and for vanished friends—perhaps Butterworth and Holst were in the composer's thoughts. To memories of the rhapsodic wordless song of the girl in A Pastoral Symphony and the wordless vocalizing of the chorus in Flos campi and the Antarctic film music, Vaughan Williams here adds—totally successfully, I believe—the spoken voice of the poet and also sets a few of the verses for the chorus. The result is one of his magical works, particularly well suited to the gramophone.
The narrator on this disc is Jack May, whose robust delivery steers the work well clear of sentimentality. Of course, if you are an ''Archers'' addict as I am, you will think it is Nelson Gabriel who is narrating, but why not, for he is intellectually a cut above most of Ambridge anyway and would appreciate this fusion of music and poetry as much as May obviously does. With the poem's reference to ''the line of festal light in Christ Church hall'', it was appropriate to have Christ Church Cathedral Choir to sing with the English String Orchestra (augmented, of course) under Stephen Darlington. I am not particularly keen on the substitution of boy's voices for women's in this music, but this recording just about gets away with it, as more surprisingly it does in a fine performance of Flos campi where women's voices really ought to be essential to convey its full erotic message. Roger Best is a splendid solo violist and the recording of both works is very satisfactory (although the chorus are rather backward in the Elegy).
The disc is completed by three examples of VW's celebratory church music. O clap your hands and the 1928 Te Deum are given excellent, sturdy performances but the marvellous Coronation setting of The Old Hundredth lacks the full panoply of brass and is taken too fast.'