A health librarian and music - more Vaughan Williams and Bach

I mentioned in my Vaughan Williams post his Fantasia on a theme by Thomas Tallis. It's so lovely that I think you should listen, if you don't know it. Here are the Toronto Symphony Orchestra playing it.

Also lovely is his Five variants of Dives and Lazarus. This, as I understand it, is five versions of the same folk tune, collected by Vaughan Williams himself, rather than five variations on one tune. It is an illustration of the folk tradition at work, the same song appearing in different geographical places, with differences in music or words. The song itself is the story of Dives and Lazarus that Jesus told (recorded in Luke 16). The tune is in some church hymn books set for the hymn "I heard the voice of Jesus say". I suspect (but have not checked, so am not an authoritative source!) that RVW himself put the tune into the English Hymnal.

And then two Vaughan Williams pieces I did not know.

This YouTube recording includes the Five Variants (and the Fantasia) but also the splendidly named March Past of the Kitchen Utensils, part of the music for The Wasps. I think I spotted a folk tune lurking in there.

I heard on BBC Radio 3 one of Vaughan Williams' Songs of Travel, settings of poems by Robert Louis Stevenson. 

And the Bach. The Netherlands Bach Society (or De Nederlandse Bachvereniging, if you would rather) is recording everything and recently put the lovely Sonata BWV 527, on YouTube. The recording, information about the piece, and a talk from the musician, is here in Nederlands and here in English.