Strings In Flight

Grace Williams - Sea Sketches

Vaughan Williams - The Lark Ascending

violin - Tristain Gurney

Florence Price - Second String Quartet arr. string orchestra

Topping the Classic FM Hall of Fame, The Lark Ascending flies free above a glowing countryside day. Though it began as a violin and piano work in 1914, Vaughan Williams created his orchestral and chamber orchestra versions soon after. Adam Johnson's beautiful arrangement here for string orchestra, with Tristain Gurney on solo violin, creates new subtleties to welcome the Govan summer.

Grace Williams composed her five Sea Sketches in London in 1944, writing shortly after, "I just long to get home and live in comfort by the sea." She returned to her home town of Barry in South Wales two years later.

Florence Price's Second String Quartet, here performed by The Glasgow Barons as a string symphony, gorgeously blends the intense romantic harmonies with the powerful awakening of her African American experience in 1935.

The Lark Ascending

He rises and begins to round,

He drops the silver chain of sound,

Of many links without a break,

In chirrup, whistle, slur and shake.

For singing till his heaven fills,

'Tis love of earth that he instils,

And ever winging up and up,

Our valley is his golden cup,

And he the wine which overflows,

To lift us with him as he goes.

Till lost on his aerial rings

In light, and then the fancy sings.

George Meredith (1828 - 1909)