William Vann

Conductor | Pianist

Discography

Edward Elgar: The Reeds by Severn Side

Edward Elgar: The Reeds by Severn Side

Chapel Choir of the Royal Hospital Chelsea, Joshua Ryan (organ), William Vann (conductor)

Visit the SOMM Recordings site for further information.

The Reeds by Severn Side is a ravishing collection of choral works by Edward Elgar. Of the 18 featured works, six are first recordings. They traverse Elgar’s remarkable ascension from lowly lawyer’s clerk to self-taught composer to Master of the King’s Musick and chart the impeccable fusing of his Roman Catholic heritage with the Anglican church tradition to which he contributed several masterpieces.

Ralph Vaughan Williams: Folk Songs Volume 4

Ralph Vaughan Williams: Folk Songs Volume 4

Mary Bevan (soprano), Nicky Spence (tenor), Roderick Williams (baritone), William Vann (piano)

Visit the Albion Records website for more information and to purchase.

“I can’t say that I found a special favourite here; every item is a delightful little gem. Five stars: The superb fourth and last instalment of Vaughan Williams’s complete folk song settings.”
James Altena – Fanfare

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Ralph Vaughan Williams: An Oxford Christmas

Ralph Vaughan Williams: An Oxford Christmas

The Chapel Choir of the Royal Hospital Chelsea, William Vann (director), Joshua Ryan (organ)

Visit the Albion Records website for more information and to purchase.

“An extra mince pie for the Chapel Choir of the Royal Hospital Chelsea, whose An Oxford Christmas is a characteristically clear-headed salute to Percy Dearmer’s The Oxford Book of Carols via Vaughan Williams’s contributions to it.” Gramophone

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Ralph Vaughan Williams: Folk Songs Volume 3

Ralph Vaughan Williams: Folk Songs Volume 3

Mary Bevan (soprano), Nicky Spence (tenor), Roderick Williams (baritone), William Vann (piano)

Visit the Albion Records website for more information and to purchase.

“‘Bushes and Briars’ leads off the recital in baritone Roderick Williams’s sensitively expressive performance…Vann’s accompaniments are a model of tact and supportiveness throughout, and he gives the Twelve Traditional Country Dances for piano just the right degree of lilt and cheerfulness.” BBC Music Magazine

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Ralph Vaughan Williams: Folk Songs Volume 2

Ralph Vaughan Williams: Folk Songs Volume 2

Mary Bevan (soprano), Nicky Spence (tenor), Roderick Williams (baritone), Thomas Gould (violin), William Vann (piano)

Visit the Albion Records website for more information and to purchase.

“This is one of the finest produced song albums that’s come my way. All three singers, recognised artists in their vocal prime, perform their allotted songs with commitment and character. They are given first rate accompaniment by pianist William Vann and, in the Two English Folk Songs for voice and violin, appropriately ‘rustic’ playing by Thomas Gould – a highlight of this album.” BBC Music Magazine

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Fearful Symmetry: Songs and Piano Music By John Sykes

Fearful Symmetry: Songs and Piano Music By John Sykes

Rowan Pierce (soprano), Gareth Brynmor John (baritone), William Vann (piano), Iain Farrington (piano)

Visit the Albion Records website for more information and to purchase.

This recording is of songs, solo piano works and a piano duo by John Sykes. The songs are largely settings from William Blake’s poems of Innocence and Experience, but there are also settings of poems by Sykes’s friend and contemporary, Randall Swingler.

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Ralph Vaughan Williams: Folk Songs Volume 1

Ralph Vaughan Williams: Folk Songs Volume 1

Mary Bevan (soprano), Nicky Spence (tenor), Roderick Williams (baritone), Jack Liebeck (violin), William Vann (piano)

Visit the Albion Records website for more information and to purchase.

This is the first in a series of four albums recording all 80 of the folk songs in English that Ralph Vaughan Williams arranged for voice and piano or violin. 57 of the 80 songs have not previously been recorded in these arrangements, so there is a good deal of unknown – but very beautiful – music to be found here.

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Parry: Judith

Parry: Judith

Sarah Fox (soprano), Toby Spence (tenor), Henry Waddington (bass-baritone), Crouch End Festival Chorus, London Mozart Players, William Vann (conductor)

Visit the Chandos Records website for more information and to purchase.

“Every aspect of this performance sounds like a labour of love. Rudge’s soaring, expressive singing as Meshullemeth gives the piece its real heart, and she’s accompanied with intense sympathy by the conductor William Vann, who avoids any suggestion of bombast or sentimentality, and builds Parry’s great paragraphs so eloquently and with such assurance that you’d think he’d been conducting this music all his life.” Gramophone

Parry’s 1888 oratorio on the Apocryphal tale of an avenging Jewish widow emerges as a worthy successor to Mendelssohn’s Elijah in this gripping world premiere recording with Sarah Fox, Kathryn Rudge and Toby Spence.

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Time And Space: Songs By Holst And Vaughan Williams

Time And Space: Songs By Holst And Vaughan Williams

Mary Bevan - soprano
Roderick Williams - baritone
Jack Liebeck - violin
William Vann - piano

Visit the Albion Records site for more information and to purchase.

This album, released on 11 October 2019, includes fourteen world-première recordings – ten of works by Holst and four by Vaughan Williams. 2019 marks the 25th anniversary of the founding of The Ralph Vaughan Williams Society in June 1994. The Society and its recording subsidiary, Albion Records, are delighted to celebrate that with our first collaboration with the Holst Society, founded in May 2017.

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Alan Charlton: Cloud and Mirrors

Alan Charlton: Cloud and Mirrors

Alan Charlton was a composer, music author and educator renowned for his innate musicality and intellectual rigour. Born in Perivale, London, in 1970, he studied horn, piano and composition at the Junior Royal Academy of Music before gaining a place at the University of Bristol to read Music. Charlton’s composition teachers included Raymond Warren, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, Robert Saxton, Adrian Beaumont and Judith Weir. His compositions have won many awards, been broadcast on BBC Radio 3, and been heard in the UK, wider Europe and around the world, at venues including London’s Barbican, Purcell Room and St Martin-in-the-Fields, St George’s Bristol, Brussels Cathedral, and in India, Jordan, Tanzania and the USA.

In 2010 he invented an entirely new harmonic language, which he dubbed Charltonality, in which he has two different scales mirror eachother: every pitch in the first scale is paired to a pitch in the second scale, and they always sound together. The technique was devised in order to create new chords and chord progressions that would otherwise be physically unplayable and very difficult to imagine aurally.

His music was also inspired by landscape, nature, and birdsong, which he regularly sought out at his parents’ home in Wensleydale and on birding trips in Ireland and wider Europe. Charlton’s music affords technical and interpretative challenges to the performer, and it expects an attentive ear from the listener, but it has always been highly practical, whether written for professionals, amateurs or children.

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