He was of his time

SQUATTING on my desk is a chunky box set crammed with recordings of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s music. A 2008 EMI release, it embraces 30 CDs featuring many genres and a host of varied inspirations, but what representative image was chosen to adorn the packaging? Through the camera lens, we find ourselves standing close by a tall oak in leaf, looking over a rustic wooden fence into rolling meadowland.

That ‘England’s Pastoral Composer’ tag has been affirmed and re-affirmed in myriad sleeve designs for Vaughan Williams recordings. It’s fair enough. He wrote copious amounts of music reflective of the English countryside, of which the ubiquitous is but one example. However, says Eric Saylor, author of a forthcoming biography of the composer, ‘thinking of Vaughan Williams in this way and the like’.