Dona Nobis Pacem

Brighton Festival 2023, with Britten Sinfonia

Vaughan Williams said that folk song ‘opened the door’ to discovering his own compositional style. Its spirit certainly hovers over The Lark Ascending, part apotheosis of the English pastoral tradition, part elegy for the folksong-singing culture that the Great War destroyed. A decade later, Brighton-born Frank Bridge wrote a folk-inflected lament for Shakespeare’s Ophelia, still singing ‘snatches of old tunes’ even as she drowns. By 1936, the idyll was over and VW’s cantata Dona nobis pacem offers a desperate plea for peace in a world hurtling towards war.