Sunday Afternoon at the Opera - Vaughan Williams: Sir John in Love

Sunday Afternoon at the Opera host Keith Brown writes:

This was the very first opera I ever broadcast on WWUH, which was on Sunday, August 8, 1982. On Sunday, August 23, 1987, I returned to the same Angel LP recording with baritone Raymond Herincx in the title role. The cast listing in that recording, taped in EMI's Abbey Road Studios in 1974, reads like a veritable Who's Who of eminent English opera singers of the period. Meredith Davies directed the New Philharmonia Orchestra and John Alldis Choir. EMI reissued this now historic recording on two compact discs in 1997 in its Classics/British Composers series. I aired the CD reissue on Sunday, August 6,2000.

Sir John in Love (1929) is Ralph Vaughan Williams' best known lyric stage work. (If any of his operas could be said to be well known at all.) The composer prepared the libretto himself directly from Shakespeare's comedy The Merry Wives of Windsor about the illicit loves of the fat old knight Sir John Falstaff. VW's score is replete with authentic English folk melodies, including the world famous 'Greensleeves" tune.

An even more historic recording of Sir John in Love came out this year through the revived British Lyrita record label. The two-CD lyrita release is derived from an airtape in monaural sound of a broadcast from BBC studios on 12-13 February, 1956. (Another item from the Itter archive.) Stanford Robinson conducted the original Philharmonia Orchestra and Sadler's Wells Chorus. Baritone Roderick Jones originally created the role of Sir John in a 1946 Sadler's Wells staging. He sang it again for the BBC concert radio program.