The evergreen popularity of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s classical chart topper, which premiered a century ago, has dimmed its profundity. Leading violinists tell us why it’s like ‘astral travelling’
It’s easy to make fun of The Lark Ascending. Perennially top of Classic FM’s Hall of Fame, it has become a byword for the conservatism of both schedulers and audiences. I’ve even written that lazy piece myself, unthinkingly dismissing the work as “bland”. So see this as a mea culpa: 100 years on from the first performance of the Lark, I have turned to a select band of internationally acclaimed violinists to ask them if the work deserves to be heard with fresh ears.
The piece was dedicated to and premiered by Marie Hall in Shirehampton Public Hall in Bristol on 15 December 1920. She and pianist Geoffrey Mendham performed Vaughan Williams’s arrangement for violin and piano; the version for violin and orchestra was premiered (by Hall) at London’s Queen’s Hall the following June. And it is in the same Bristol village hall exactly a century later that the British violinist Jennifer Pike will recreate the work’s first ever performance in a concert that will be streamed on 15 December.