O Thou Transcendent - The Life Of Ralph Vaughan Williams [2007]

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Customer reviews

review by: date: 2008-11-11 rating:
A truly enjoyable documentary
This film is worth watching from many perspectives. The life of Vaughan Williams is portrayed in a balanced way, the excerpts from his music are beautifully played and presented, the interviews are excellent and informative. Interesting narrative and a great subject all make this a film for all abilities and backgrounds, from the lay person to the professional musician.

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review by: date: 2008-10-25 rating:
A disappointment.....
As someone who enjoys the music of RVW as well as the general excellence of British documentary composition (Grier, Anstey, Jennings) I have to say that "O Thou Transcendent" was a disappointment. My suggestion is to rent, but do not purchase.

First, unless one already has some knowledge of the life of RVW the documentary's narrative could, and probably will, become very confusing. The time lines are constantly cross backwards and forwards. Second, where is the 3rd symphony? The documentary mentions Butterworth, to whom the 2nd was dedicated, and then the narrator moves on to state "but RVW never talked of his war experiences." Maybe he didn't "talk" about them, but the 3rd is as near as we'll get to what he did emotionally take with him from France. This, on the surface, is a glaring omission of any RVW biography but likely reflects the thesis that the documentary makers wanted RVW's "war" music and RVW's temperament to life in general to be representative of the more dissonant 4th or 6th, not the pastoral 3rd.

Several other aspects leave a bad taste. Perhaps the most unfortunate is that this is presentation is not suitable for a pre-watershed audience. My young children are being slowly and enjoyably introduced to the works of RVW (and and Holst and Tallis). The intercut graphic scenes of the death camps, a child burning to death, or the dead child on the stretcher during the playing of the 6th is grotesque. Second is the inclusion of "Hello!" magazine gossip relating to more distant family members and RVW's relationship with Ursula. Why are these pieces of information included and not his work at the RCM during the 1920s? As another reviewer has pointed out, this documentary is a 21st century treatment with the pre-formed particular bias of the film makers shining through. I have an unlikely hope that someone in a few years may be able to use some the present footage to create a more fitting portrait of Britain's finest 20th century composer.

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review by: vknoppda date: 2008-07-17 rating:
Marvellous, but...
As a biography of R.V.W. it is a marvellous compilation of facts and music
samples.
Slightly annoying, however, that the picture material is not adapted to a general format. So historical film sequences appear "broadened", i.e. with horizontally inflated proportions.

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review by: date: 2008-05-25 rating:
A case for letting the music do all the talking
The solitary indisputable triumph of this film lies in the performances of extracts from many of the works of Ralph Vaughan Williams. With one exception, they are very well performed; well enough, I suspect and hope, to inspire those unfamiliar with the composer's works to seek out complete recordings, or, better still, live performances. The problem, however, is that the quality of the music and of the performances disguises the truly threadbare nature of everything else in this documentary. It is a tragically missed opportunity, considering that people who worked with Vaughan Williams, including some who knew him well, were interviewed, but seem to have been invited to comment only on the most ridiculous trivia. I find it hard, for instance, to believe that the late Evelyn Barbirolli, a highly talented musician in her own right, as well as the wife of Sir John and a friend of RVW, had no more insights into the composer's music than are vouchsafed here. The interviews that actually do touch on the music in detail tend to be those with people not obviously qualified to inform us about anything other than their own opinions, notably Stephen Johnson. His fatuous comments about the Tallis Fantasia have already been rightly criticized by some reviewers here and defended, pretty ineptly, by other contributors. Johnson asserts that the Fantasia is obsessed with death, which observation is used by Tony Palmer to justify treating the Fantasia as a premonition of WWI, a self-evidently absurd idea. To be fair to Johnson, his own comments are never quite that daft, but they seem wilfully misleading, even so. Johnson is at pains to point out that Vaughan Williams used the Tallis theme first as the tune for a hymn, setting the words, "When Rising From My Bed of Death". According to Johnson, this shows the morbid associations that RVW attached to the music and thence to his Fantasia. Vaughan Williams, however, must have known the original setting of the Tallis tune, as one of a number of wonderful melodies contributed to Archbishop Parker's Psalter: "Why fum'th in fight the Gentiles spite, in fury raging stout?" It's not about death, any more than is the text to which he matched the sublime tune. "When Rising From My Bed of Death" is about life, in the form of resurrection, and not really about death at all. That Vaughan Williams probably didn't believe in "the life everlasting" is neither here nor there; he knew what the text of the hymn meant (unlike Mr. Johnson, apparently) and his choice of tune suited that meaning, not his own viewpoint on matters religious. This notion of RVW's music as raging against The War, or just war in general, becomes an idee fixe of the film, with plenty of imagery dating from wars well after RVW's lifetime. It's a bit like Mussolini's nationalisation of Puccini, when Puccini was at death's door and too weak to object. Palmer colonises dead RVW with a host of preconceptions, displaying very little sign that he (Palmer) either knows how to distinguish between true testimony and mere opinion, or has made very much effort to try. I think I am being very generous in giving three stars to this film, but I have to be fair to the musicians. Left to themselves, they'd get five.


review by: almac1975 date: 2008-04-26 rating:
A fine film whose virtues greatly outweigh its shortcomings
I've read the other reviews so far and find them largely a very thoughtful and interesting collection - maybe that in itself is a small tribute to the subject of this film, Ralph Vaughan Williams. V.W. is not a fashionable composer and never really was (Andre Previn makes the point in the film that orchestral programmers are reluctant to allow him to put VW Symphonies on his programmes). That, again, is perhaps to his credit. He was an entirely individual voice, and I think this film goes some way towards explaining where this individuality came from and examining its nature. It is a long film with a wealth of good material - excellent contributions from Michael Kennedy, Stephen Johnson, Ursula Vaughan Williams (very touchingly at the end as a very old, frail lady speaking simply about the man and how much she loved him), friends, people associated with the Leith Hill Festival , Lady Barbirolli, etc., etc.. There are also excellent musical contributions from the National Youth orchestra under Sian Edwards and the Hungarian State Orchestra under Tamas Vasary, and we see a number of fine singers, Nicola Benedetti and others too. I am not quite so fond of the very 'staged', backlit filming of the orchestras and conductors as some other reviewers have been - it is indeed very dramatic, but it is also very artificial. I am happier with the wonderfully natural short extract from an archive broadcast of Sir Adrian Boult conducting the Romanza of the Fifth Symphony. However, the musical illustrations are a strong element in this film. So is the archive footage of places with which Vaughan Williams was associated and Victorian and Edwardian London. What I am less certain about is the link made between horror and his music. He did indeed serve in the First War and live with memories from that for the rest of his life, and the 'Pastoral' Symphony is usually (perhaps paradoxically) associated with that, but very very stark, almost unwatchable images from other wars and conflicts form an important element in this film and I am not convinced that the thesis they seem to project is right. There is also a fair degree of weight placed on the nature of his first marriage (to the long-term invalid Adeline Fisher), and the explicitness with which this is investigated, and in particular some comments made on his relationship with Ursula, his second wife, as a young woman, while possibly quite accurate, are uncomfortable ; V.W. and all those of his time would I think have been unhappy with them, would have regarded these as private matters. In all of this the hand of the filmmaker of our time is a little too apparent. Having said that, it is clearly a film made with love. Its largely chronological structure works well. Despite what I said about the orchestral backlighting, there are certainly moments when the music blazes the more effectively because of the way it is presented - I think, for example, of the end of 'The Pilgrim's Progress', which comes at us with tremendous conviction. And in the end, there is so much in this film that is good that there is never any question of a poor review ; I think back, as another reviewer did, to Ken Russell's terrible, terrible self-indulgent film on the same subject and am the more thankful that this new film exists. It lasts 2 hours and 28 minutes - a long time - but, though I have some reservations, I was never less than interested and never less than certain that we were watching a good film about a great composer and that all that appeared on screen gave evidence of his greatness. In that sense, if not quite in every other, I think it did justice to its subject.

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