“The art of music above all arts is the expression of the soul of the nation,” Ralph Vaughan Williams once said. The Fantasia on Greensleeves, which initially sprang to life as music from Act III of the composer’s Shakespeare-inspired opera Sir John in Love, encapsulates this thought. Vaughan Williams creates a serene, pastoral meditation on the traditional English folk tune, a 16^th-century broadside ballad that came to be associated with Christmas by the 17^th century. Today, the tune is well known in many different contexts, from ice cream trucks in the United Kingdom to a recurring motive in the musical SIX, about the wives of King Henry VIII. 

—Jennifer More, ©2024