Leighton:
Veris Gratia, Op. 6

Williams:
An Oxford Elegy

Rowan Atkinson joins the Choir of The Queen’s College Oxford and the Britten Sinfonia for a per- formance of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s late masterpiece An Oxford Elegy, written in his 70s for The

Queen’s College and premiered there in 1952. Another work written for Queen’s receives its first recording here: Kenneth Leighton’s choral cantata Veris gratia Op.6, composed while was a student

at Queen’s and premiered there in 1951. Both works imaginatively evoke the pastoral and the bucol- ic: Leighton’s cantata celebrates young love in spring and summer through the hedonistic poetry of

the medieval Carmina burana, while Vaughan Williams sets Matthew Arnold’s nostalgic poetry, with its iconic description of Oxford as ‘that sweet city with her dreaming spires’.