Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis

Vaughan Williams gave a copy of the printed full score of the Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis to Boult in January 1922, but it was another ten years before he conducted it. The reasons for this are unclear: perhaps Boult was initially doubtful of the work’s effectiveness in a concert hall, as opposed to a cathedral or large church where the spatial separation of the strings would make a stronger impact; or perhaps he felt that of all Vaughan Williams’s pieces, it was the one that least needed his advocacy: in the 1920s it was performed in New York by Damrosch and Mengelberg, in Philadelphia by Stokowski, in Amsterdam by Monteux, and in Leipzig by Furtwängler. This was an international success that none of his other works enjoyed at the time, and it continued in the 1930s and 40s when it was taken up by Bruno Walter, Koussevitzky and Toscanini. In spite of numerous live performances, the Tallis Fantasia was something of a rarity on the BBC during the 1920s: there was only one nationally broadcast performance as part of an all-Vaughan Williams concert with the Wireless Orchestra conducted by the composer on 19 December 1926.

Boult gave his first performance of the Tallis Fantasia on 6 May 1931 in a Queen’s Hall concert by the BBCSO. The next day The Times printed a review that began with an assessment of what Boult and his orchestra had achieved in their first season:

When Mr Boult came on to conduct the last of the series of the BBC symphony concerts, which have made the last season so memora-ble, he was greeted with determined applause, which was more than doubled at the end of the concert. It was a grateful recognition on the part of the public that orchestral playing of the highest class is now to be heard regularly in London, and a recognition in the stricter sense of the plain fact that of all the conductors who have handled the new orchestra Mr Boult most consistently obtains the best playing … Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on a Theme of Tallis is a noble work of a fine mind, and it was played by the strings of the orchestra with a combination of subtlety and breadth.