Four Last Songs

for SATB and piano
Jonathan Wikeley's choral arrangement of Vaughan Williams's Four Last Songs offers a new way to engage with these beautiful late works. The texts are by Ursula Vaughan Williams, and the set begins and ends with two poems that were inspired by Greek mythology. The opening song, 'Procris', and the closing song, 'Menelaus', have flowing piano accompaniments that remain unchanged from the original solo voice versions. The two songs in the middle, 'Tired' and 'Hands, Eyes, and Heart', are unaccompanied in this arrangement, with a double-choir texture that incorporates the original chordal piano line in a way that is consistent with Vaughan Williams's own double-choir writing.
The songs are available in their original form, for solo voice and piano accompaniment, in the first volume of Collected Songs by Vaughan Williams.

Ralph Vaughan Williams, born in Gloucestershire on 12 October 1872, read History at Cambridge and went to the Royal College of Music where his teachers were Parry, Wood, and Stanford. Vaughan Williams believed in the value of music education and wrote practical competition pieces, serviceable church music, and with the 49th Parallel (1940-41) he found a new outlet in writing for film. His profoundly disturbing Symphony No.6 (1948) received international acclaim with more than a hundred performances in a little over two years. His great sensitivity to the 20th-century human condition, his flexibility in writing for all levels of music making, and his unquestionably great imagination combine to make him one of the key figures in 20th century music. Ralph Vaughan Williams had a long association with Oxford University Press; over 200 publications are available in the Oxford catalogue.