Spotlight Vaughan Williams: “Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis”

Being more or less official chief conductor of the Philharmonia Orchestra London during its very first years, it was obvious that Karajan would be conducting some British music – a national school that most German/Austrian conductors ignored. But the coincidence wasn’t as clear as it appears. Karajan recorded Holst’s “Planets” twice but never conducted it with a British orchestra, and he started conducting Vaughan Williams’ “Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis” in February 1948 with the Vienna Philharmonic, two months before he stood in front of the Philharmonia for the very first time (notably with Strauss, Schumann and Beethoven). Karajan’s biographer Peter Uehling put it like this: “Although Karajan was trained as a German Kapellmeister, in the German repertoire and in the German system he succeeded easily in Italy, England and France. Donizetti, Ravel, Vaughan Williams – he was able to adopt every style.” In May 1948, he worked on the “Tallis Fantasia” also with the Academia di Santa Cecilia in Rome. It wasn’t until 1953 that he went into the studios with the Philharmonia to record it. It was a recording that in England – according to Richard Osborne – “was generally preferred to some home-grown recordings.” Subsequently, Karajan and the Philharmonia performed the Fantasia eight times in London and on tour in Italy and the United States in 1954 and 1955. On 21 and 22 November 1954, Karajan also interpreted it with the Berlin Philharmonic. It was only their fourth joint concert after the war and the last one before Furtwängler’s death eight days later which gave Karajan the opportunity to become the Berliners’ chief conductor. Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt, a musicologist and critic, wrote about that concert: “Only a highly refined sense of sound can divine the furthest secrets of the ‘Tallis Fantasia’s’ ecstatic score. It is precisely this, however, which is Herbert von Karajan’s great strength.”

In 1988, Richard Osborne asked Karajan if he had used the Tallis Fantasia as a training piece for the string sections both of the Philharmonia and the Berlin Philharmonic. He said no.

“It was a piece I am very fond of and it happened to be in quite a few programmes at that time.”

(In the mid-1950s, Vaughan Williams was not only still alive but also composing symphonies!) The last time Karajan conducted the Fantasia was almost twenty years later in 1974 with the Berlin Philharmonic.
Osborne reports that Karajan thought about recording Vaughan Williams fourth and sixth symphonies in the 1980s, but it didn’t happen. One single performance of the Fourth with the Philharmonia in 1954 is noted in our data base.

—  P.R. Jenkins