Showing 6 results

Record description
Croydon Philharmonic Society Recordings: Five Tudor Portraits by Ralph Vaughan Williams
Print preview View:

Croydon Philharmonic Society Recordings: Five Tudor Portraits by Ralph Vaughan Williams

  • AR28
  • Collection
  • [27 Jan] 1937

5 lacquered aluminium gramophone disks, carrying recording of R. Vaughan Williams, Five Tudor Portraits (disjointed excerpts), performed by BBC Symphony Orchestra and Croydon Philharmonic Society, etc, and broadcast on the BBC National Programme, 27 Jan 1937.

Five Tudor Portraits consists of settings of poems By John Skelton (1460-1529). It was first performed in September 1936 at the Norwich Festival. This recording is from its first London performance, broadcast on the BBC on 27 Jan 1937. The broadcast ran from 8.44pm to 9.32pm: it therefore overran slightly, and the 9.30 Greenwich Time Signal can be heard towards the end of the recording.

Another performance was given at North End Hall, Croydon, on 4 Dec 1937, by Croydon Philharmonic Society and the London Symphony Orchestra. Vaughan Williams was in the audience, and this performance was also broadcast.

The discs are numbered 418-421 and 492. The recording appears to have been made on a single disc cutting machine. There are therefore lost pieces of the performance between sides, due to side changing; and there are also recording skips, due to cutting errors, on sides 1 and 6. Approximately 35 minutes of recorded material survives, from a performance lasting 48 minutes. Disc 492 (one sided) is a different generation recording from the rest of the material, and fills the skip on side 6. It may have been dubbed from another recording of the same performance; or it is possible (although unlikely) that it was taken from the December performance.

Croydon Philharmonic Society