Thank You, Ralph Vaughan Williams

By Adam Hincks, S.J.

Ralph Vaughn Williams (1872-1958)   Photo: Bettmann/Corbis

I think I should have no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of music. 
– George Eliot
Last weekend a friend treated me to a concert by the Vancouver Cantata Singers featuring the choral music of the great English composers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century: Charles Wood, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Edward Elgar, Herbert Howells, Gustav Holst and Hubert Parry. The performance had both sacred and secular music—including a delightful romp through settings of Shakespeare’s and others’ poetry—with the centrepiece being Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Mass in G Minor.