Serenade to Music

On October 5, 1938, Sir Henry Wood celebrated 50 years as a conductor with a jubilee concert at the Royal Albert Hall—a spectacular gala event, featuring no fewer than three orchestras and Sergei Rachmaninoff as solo pianist. But the centerpiece was Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Serenade to Music—a musical gift specially tailored both to the occasion and the 16 starry solo singers who performed it. (A version arranged for choir and just four soloists is sometimes performed and recorded.) Setting words from Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice that meditate on the beauty of music and night, this rapturous, tender 15-minute work is its own creature: A free-form rhapsody in which the voices weave in and out of the orchestral texture—sometimes singly, sometimes as a choir. Each solo line is marked with the original soloist’s initials, celebrating the most distinctive qualities of each individual voice. The effect brings us back to Shakespeare’s original text—the voices like the stars young lovers Jessica and Lorenzo marvel at, scattered brightly across the orchestral sky.