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When was Vaughan Williams’s
Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis first performed?
When Vaughan Williams conducted the first performance of his
Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis for strings in Gloucester Cathedral, at the Three Choirs Festival in September 1910, he unveiled a masterpiece that was to renew an entire musical tradition. Compiling a new edition of the English Hymnal, he had been impressed by the sombre splendour of a Phrygian-mode tune contributed by Tallis to the 1567 Psalter for Matthew Parker, the first post-Reformation Archbishop of Canterbury. Vaughan Williams also knew the Baroque concerto grosso, with its contrasted solo and collective string groups. Based on Tallis’s magnificent theme, the