The Piano Music of Ralph Vaughan Williams
Sheet Music

SKU: NX.SOMMCD-0164

By Mark Bebbington and Rebeca Omordia. By Ralph Vaughan Williams. Classical. Listening CD. Naxos #SOMMCD 0164. Published by Naxos (NX.SOMMCD-0164).

UPC: 748871016422.

After his "hope across the Atlantic" for his all-Gershwin disc, Mark Bebbington returns to the English fare for which he is best-known, with the Complete Vaughan Williams Piano Music. This SOMM release contains world premiere recordings, notably the Introduction and Fugue. In this work, and in the Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis, both written for two-pianos, Bebbington is joined by the gifted young Romanian-Nigerian pianist Rebeca Ormordia. The Tallis Fantasia in its original string version is an evergreen English work, repeatedly topping Classic FM's listener surveys of favorite pieces. Of its two-piano version, Bebbington says: In transcribing the Fantasia for two pianos Vaughan Williams has created a work with leaner textures and clearer polyphony. The premiere recording on this disc is the Introduction and Fugue for two pianost written in 1947, which RVW dedicated to the famous two-piano team Phyllis Sellick and Cyril Smith. Bebbington says: "Vaughan Williams wrote the Introduction and Fugue concurrently with the Sixth Symphony - a work which shocked the musical world with its undisguised brutality and modernism, and this piano work belongs to the same musical aesthetic.

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