Sir Antonio Pappano and the London Symphony Orchestra released an album with Vaughan Williams Symphonies 4 & 6 that garnered major critical acclaim after its release on LSO Live in April. Now, the LSO’s next Chief Conductor returns to NativeDSD with a Live Stereo and 5.1 Surround Sound DSD 256 recording of the composer’s beloved ‘Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis’.

Known for its lush, expansive music for string orchestra, not only is the ‘Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis’ one of Vaughan Williams’s most cherished works, but it was also named amongst the nation’s favorite pieces in the Classic FM Hall of Fame 2021. Also known as the ‘Tallis Fantasia’, its beautiful theme originates from another English musician, the 16th-century composer Thomas Tallis.

Vaughan Williams wrote the piece during one of his most fruitful periods of composition, after being commissioned by the Gloucester Three Choirs Festival. In the end, he presented a landmark piece that his biographer James Day calls ‘unquestionably the first work by Vaughan Williams that is recognizably and unmistakably his and no one else’s’. It became the work to cement Vaughan Williams’ reputation not only at home, but across the rest of Europe.

This recording by Sir Antonio Pappano was captured on Sunday March 15, 2020, the night before the first coronavirus lockdown in the UK. During the same Barbican concert in which his celebrated account of the composer’s Sixth Symphony was also made. It joins the London Symphony’s next Chief Conductor’s critically acclaimed recordings of the Fourth and Sixth Symphonies, also available at NativeDSD.

Sir Antonio Pappano, Conductor
London Symphony Orchestra