A miniature rite of a very English spring: a Vaughan Williams rediscovery in Liverpool

Imagine a folk dance without music. Actually, you don’t have to: poke about on YouTube and you’ll find footage from 1912 (there’s music dubbed on, but it’s a silent film) of Vaughan Williams’s friend George Butterworth in full Morris fig, going through the moves with Cecil Sharp and a pair of pinafore-wearing gals. Note the precision of his movements, that big Kitchener moustache: how seriously Butterworth is taking it, four years before he stopped a bullet on the Somme. And they really were sincere, those folk song pioneers. The same modernising impulse drove Bartok on his song-collecting journeys at the opposite end of Europe, and in 1913 – two weeks after the première of Le Sacre du printemps – Sharp’s Morris side gave demonstration performances to an avant-garde crowd in Paris.

Still, I would not have predicted that the most striking moment in a recent Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra concert under Andrew Manze would come from The Running Set, a six-minute squib that Vaughan Williams wrote in 1934 for an international folk dance festival in London. ‘The Running Set’ was also a folk dance without music. Sharp encountered it in Kentucky and detected English roots in the traditional moves, while noting that the original melodies had been lost.

Vaughan Williams duly filled the gap, and if nothing sounds more disturbingly redolent of the 1930s than mass folk dance at the Royal Albert Hall, wait until you hear the piece. It snaps brusquely into action, and – at least as conducted by Manze – bounds forward with a breathless, kinetic energy. VW includes a piano in the orchestra, doubtless as a practical aid for amateur performances, but nothing springs an orchestral sonority into the 20th century like a piano and it flashed and stabbed its way through the texture like chrome-toothed steel.