FIFTY YEARS OF THANKS....

Funny how things stick in your mind. I can recall quite clearly when I got turned on to classical music. I was in my late teens when I first heard the music of Gustav Holst and Ralph Vaughan Williams. At the time, I was staying with my parents where they lived in a small out-of-the-way hamlet which was surrounded by other small hamlets, interspersed with farmland, woods and wide open spaces.

I was reading a book borrowed from a local resident, which detailed the history of the area - even down to the field names and the ancient words to describe the fields, woods, copses and common land - pightles and the like. I seemed to be immersed in a truly rural setting when, quite fortuitously, the radio treated me to Vaughan Williams` Folk Song Suite, which seemed perfectly to capture the time and the place.

So I got interested in Vaughan Williams, who died 50 years ago this year and I have forever since been grateful to him for opening my ears to the joy of not only his music but also the other great English composers - Elgar, Holst of course, Delius and so many others - which led to a much wider appreciation (see, for example, `my complete profile.)

But the root of my appreciation has always been the work of Vaughan Williams and Holst. Now, Holst is best known for The Planets, of course, but there is so much more to him than that and for me his most appealing work is also based on the English folk songs that he and Vaughan Williams collected and orchestrated so vividly. As for Vaughan Williams himself, time and space prevents me from boring you to death with a full biography, but it`s worth noting that, despite his Cymraic name, he was actually born in Gloucestershire and spent much of his life in Dorking of all places. His long and productive life is detailed at http://www.rvwsociety.com/biography.html if you want to read more.

His music - symphonies, choral work, concertos, film scores (`Scott of the Antarctic`) - is a huge collection but if I had to pick just a couple of them I guess it would be The Lark Ascending (Nigel Kennedy gives it a good go) and his Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis, all 17 minutes of which you can hear at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5y7nJL1hpUU. If you think you`ve heard it before, you may have seen `Master and Commander,` where it was heavily featured.

There are events and concerts already happening to mark the 50th anniversary of his passing and I for one owe the great man a huge debt of gratitude for opening my ears and my mind to life beyond Bill Haley and the Comets.