THE LETTERS OF RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS

From R. Vaughan Williams,
10, Hanover Terrace,
Regents Park,
London, N.W.1.

March 29th 1957

Dear Alan,

I have written to Szigeti c/o you, will you kindly forward it?  We listened to Mitropolous, and thought much of it was very good, though he did not seem to understand the tunes in the last movement.  Then we turned on Adrian, which we liked much better, then we turned on my early recordidng¹ which we liked better still!!!²
Yrs

RVW

1. sic.
2. Mitropoulos had made a recording of the Fourth Symphony . The letter to Josef Szigeti was almost certainly connected with the Violin Sonata, Catalogue of Works 1954/4, of which he had given the first public performance, in Rochester New York. Writing to Mervyn Horder in 1972 Szigeti asked Horder to tell UVW that he had been unable to locate a tape of one of his ‘dozen or so performances of the V.W. Violin Sonata at universities in USA around 1959’ and regretting that ‘no younger violin “star” seems to have taken up this fine and challenging work’ (Citation taken from entry in May & May sale catalogue no.201 May 1992, item 773).