Violinist Jack Liebeck is joined by by members of the VOCES8 Foundation Choir & Orchestra for a new arrangement of Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending.

Originally scored for orchestra and violin solo, this new adaption by Barnaby Smith combines Vaughan Williams’s original score with fragments from Paul Drayton’s choral arrangement, allowing for the George Meredith poetry which originally inspired Vaughan Williams to be heard with the full orchestral score for the first time.

The text is as follows:

He rises and begins to round,

He drops the silver chain of sound

Of many links without a break,

As up he wings the spiral stair,

A song of light, that pierces air

To reach the shining tops of day,

And drink in everything discern’d

An ecstasy to music turn’d.

He is, the hills, the human line,

The meadows green, the fallows brown,

He sings the sap, the quicken’d veins;

The wedding song of sun and rains

He is, the dance of children, thanks

Of sowers, shout of primrose-banks,

And eye of violets while they breathe;

All these the circling song will wreathe.

Was never voice of ours could say

Our inmost in the sweetest way,

Like yonder voice aloft, and link

All hearers in the song they drink.

 

The work features on the album To Sing of Love

Watch: Violinist Jack Liebeck on Vaughan Williams’s rarely performed Concerto Accademico

Read: Technique: Playing in the lower half of the bow

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