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

Best of Technique

In The Best of Technique you’ll discover the top playing tips of the world’s leading string players and teachers. It’s packed full of exercises for students, plus examples from the standard repertoire to show you how to integrate the technique into your playing.

Masterclass

The Strad’s Masterclass series brings together the finest string players with some of the greatest string works ever written. Always one of our most popular sections, Masterclass has been an invaluable aid to aspiring soloists, chamber musicians and string teachers since the 1990s.

Calendars

American collector David L. Fulton amassed one of the 20th century’s finest collections of stringed instruments. This year’s calendar pays tribute to some of these priceless treasures, including Yehudi Menuhin’s celebrated ‘Lord Wilton’ Guarneri, the Carlo Bergonzi once played by Fritz Kreisler, and four instruments by Antonio Stradivari.