Vaughan Williams' The Lark Ascending

Continuing Radio 3's Vaughan Williams Today season, marking the 150th anniversary of the composer’s birth, Kate Kennedy chooses her favourite recording of Ralph Vaughan Williams' The Lark Ascending.

In Vaughan Williams' modal and folk music-inflected The Lark Ascending a solo violin takes flight above the orchestra evoking for many the very essence of an idealised English countryside. But this popular work, written on the eve of the First World War, has perhaps inevitably become freighted with nostalgia for both a lost generation and a rural way of life which was soon to vanish forever.