The Story of a Flemish Farm (from the World War II propaganda flick The Flemish Farm) is a remarkably unbombastic and tasteful collection of recognizable RVW. The 25-minute-long suite assembled here flows very effectively, with sufficient internal contrast to permit the music to survive independently. The Loves of Joanna Godden is even better. The composer sanctioned this arrangement of about 10 cues into a unified whole, turning it into a nature-inspired tone poem very much in the style of the contemporaneous Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, as well as The Pilgrim’s Progress. In short, it’s very beautiful.
Bitter Springs was mostly composed by Ernest Irving working with a few tunes supplied by Vaughan Williams, so it has a bit less personality–but it’s still very good movie music. The performances are up to the high standards of this series to date, and the engineering is excellent. If you’ve been collecting this music, then by all means continue. It’s nice that the fact that a composer is dead doesn’t mean that new works won’t keep popping up, as the modern army of posthumous arrangers go to work on every scrap that he wrote (or in the case of Elgar and others, didn’t write!). [2/15/2007]
