No, that doesn’t refer to the BBC’s latest classic serial Lark Rise at Candleford, but to Vaughan Williams’s famous piece The Lark Ascending, which topped Classic FM’s listeners’ poll for their favourite piece of music.

It was Ralph VW’s year, for he also came third with his more substantial work Fantasies on a Theme of Thomas Tallis.

Half a century after his death, the British composer’s 1914 programme piece of a lark singing over the English countryside took the number one spot in the Hall of Fame for the second year in a row.

More than 100,000 Classic FM listeners voted in the survey.

Darren Henley of Classic FM said: “The British public has spoken and declared Vaughan Williams their champion. In the 50 years since his death, Vaughan Williams has cemented his position as among the best-loved English composers of all time.”

At number two was Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto, while Beethoven’s Fifth Piano Concerto and Sixth Symphony took fourth and fifth place.

The full Top 20 :

1. Vaughan Williams - The Lark Ascending
2. Rachmaninov - Piano Concerto No 2
3. Vaughan Williams - Fantasia On A Theme Of Thomas Tallis
4. Beethoven - Piano Concerto No 5
5. Beethoven - Symphony No 6
6. Mozart - Clarinet Concerto
7. Elgar - Cello Concerto
8. Bruch - Violin Concerto No 1
9. Elgar - Enigma Variations
10. Beethoven - Symphony No 9
11. Pachelbel - Canon
12. Barber - Adagio for Strings
13. Jenkins - The Armed Man: A Mass For Peace
14. Vivaldi - Four Seasons
15. Rachmaninov - Rhapsody On A Theme Of Paganini
16. Holst - The Planets
17. Grieg - Piano Concerto
18. Tchaikovsky - 1812 Overture
19. Mozart - Requiem
20. Handel - Messiah.

Two weeks ago, the Royal Albert Hall in London saw the musical resurrection. of John Foulds’s A World Requiem to mark Remembrance Sunday. The once popular piece had not been performed for 81 years.

It was composed in the aftermath of the Great War (1914-1918) to commemorate the dead of all nations and was given a warm reception at the time.

For four years in succession, from 1923 to 1926, the Requiem was the centrepiece of the Armistice Day Festival, which in those days brought Britain to a standstill every 11 November.

The Requiem needed 1,250 musicians to perform such was the scale of the work.

Then the Requiem was dropped. So too was the composer, who never heard his piece played again. Foulds died of cholera 13 years later while living in self-imposed exile in India. His pacifist views were shunned by polite society and his work quickly forgotten.

John Foulds was born in Manchester in 1880, the son of a bassoonist in the Halle Orchestra. He played as a cellist in promenade and theatre bands before joining the Halle cellos in 1900.

He had been composing since childhood. During his years as a cellist in the Halle at the beginning of the 20th century he wrote piano music, string quartets, symphonic poems and a vast 3-part concert opera for soloists, chorus and orchestra called The Vision of Dante, based on The Divine Comedy. Only a few of them were ever performed.

However, the conductor Hans Richter gave him conducting experience. Although Henry Wood presented some of Foulds’s early orchestral compositions at the Queen’s Hall Proms, he became best-known as a successful composer of light-music, such as the once-famous Keltic Lament (1911).

He is indeed a forgotten composer, who didn’t fit in with the zeitgeist of post-war Britain. The resurrection of his Requiem is a useful addition to the repertoire.

Frank Bridge (1879-1941) is not much heard of nowadays. He was born in Brighton of a working-class family and studied at the Royal College of Music in London from 1899 to 1903 under Charles Villiers Stanford and others.

Despite his “revolutionary” ideas, his composing career never took off. He later found success as a conductor.

Bridge’s pacifism didn’t go down well in World War I and his greatest solace came from the landscapes of the South Downs in Sussex. His biographer, Rob Barnett said, “Such was the spell cast by … the Downs and the seascape, that he was moved to write a musical nature poem, Enter Spring, which was his masterpiece.

Frank Bridge played the viola in a number of string quartets, most notably the English String Quartet, and conducted, sometimes deputising for Henry Wood, before devoting himself to composition, receiving the patronage of Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge. He privately tutored a number of pupils, most famously Benjamin Britten, who later championed his teacher’s music and paid homage to him in the Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge (1937), based on a theme from the second of Bridge’s Three Idylls for String Quartet (1906). Bridge died in Eastbourne.

Among Bridge’s works are the orchestral The Sea (1911), Oration (1930) for cello and orchestra and the opera The Christmas Rose (premiered 1932), but he is perhaps most highly regarded today for his chamber music. His early works are in a late-Romantic idiom, but later pieces such as the third (1926) and fourth (1937) string quartets are harmonically advanced and very distinctive, showing the influence of the Second Viennese School.

For an organization noted for giving financial support to a man walking around East Anglia with a pole on his head, and another kicking an empty curry carton down a street, its refusal to stump up funds for the 150th anniversary of the birth of Sir Edward Elgar should come as no surprise.

The English Arts Council exists after all within the cosy, politically-correct confines of the current British public sector. Maybe they should reflect that Elgar came from very humble origins and pulled himself up by his bootstraps by teaching himself composing.

Mainly known for the Pomp and Circumstance Marches, Elgar was born in 1857 in Lower Broadheath near Malvern. His links with nearby Birmingham were celebrated with an anniversary concert at the Symphony Hall in April.

The Dream of Gerontius will also be performed by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in another concert in June.

Elgar helped found the orchestra which began its Elgar celebrations in March with a performance of his cello concerto.

Elgar died in 1934, which also saw the death of two other great English composers — Gustav Holst and Frederick Delius.