FANTASIA ON GREENSLEEVES

Created on 30/03/2005
Latest update on 26/04/2010

Artist: Ralph Vaughan Williams
Author: Ralph Vaughan Williams/Ralph Greaves
Label: EMI
Year: 1934

Conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra in the Queen's Hall in London. It's an arrangement by Ralph Greaves on R. Vaughan Williams' opera Sir John In Love, based upon Shakespeare's The Merry Wives Of Windsor. There's your link with Henry VIII and Falstaff, characters mentioned in conjunction with the tune Greensleeves (see there). What sets the Fantasia apart is the entr'acte, based on folktune Lovely Joan, first collected by Vaughan Williams in 1908 in Norfolk and published in The Penguin Book Of English Folk Songs. The Lovely Joan tune first appeared in the interlude between scenes 1 & 2 of Act II of Sir John In Love ('29).

Covers:

1959:

Alfred Deller & The Deller Consort [as Lovely Joan]

1960:

A.L. Lloyd [idem]

1965:

Martin Carthy [idem]

1967:

Shirley Collins [idem]

1977:

Deirdre [idem]

1986:

Emerson, Lake & Powell [as Touch And Go, their version of that Lovely Joan part]

1988:

Barbara Dickson [as Lovely Joan]

1992:

Miranda Sex Garden [idem]

1993:

Louis Killen [idem]

2004:

Stone Angel [idem]

Contact


If you noticed blunt omissions, mis-interpretations or even out-and-out errors,
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info@originals.be

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