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View Full Version : Album Club - Week 152: 01/07/2014: Ralph Vaughan Williams - Symphony No. 5 in D major



Album Club
01-07-2014, 19:46
Big thanks to Lawrence (losenotaminute) for this week's choice.

My selection is a classical album, which is only the second so far on Album Club! Given the approach of summer, I have selected Vaughan Williams’ 5th symphony.

Vaughan Williams is a quintessential English composer, one of the three greats alongside Elgar and Britten. He is a musical genius IMO, and I hope you enjoy this week’s selection

The Spotify link is for a performance by Hallé orchestra conducted by Sir Mark Elder.

spotify:album:7sWlx2FeX7PaFuewsmvkW2

YouTube link:
watch?v=q9YoEETzYsE

This album makes me think of the outdoors, big skies, weather and whatnot, with a grandeur and sense of English history in the mix.

From Wikipedia:

“Symphony No. 5 in D major by English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams was written between 1938 and 1943. In style it represents a shift away from the violent dissonance of the Fourth Symphony, and a return to the more romantic style of the earlier Pastoral Symphony. It is also noteworthy as perhaps the quietest symphony Vaughan Williams ever wrote, with only a very few passages rising even to a forte. The texture throughout the work is strongly dominated by the strings.”

I borrowed the following from an article in the Guardian:

“The most common image of Ralph Vaughan Williams is that of the comfortable English pastoralist, and the Fifth Symphony, the most widely performed of his nine, seems on first acquaintance to conform totally to that image. But there's more to the genesis of the work than that. It is bracketed in Vaughan Williams's symphonic development by two very different works, the violent and extreme Fourth Symphony of 1935, which seems to foreshadow the world-wide conflagration to come, and the Sixth (1947), which inhabits a world totally numbed by the horror of what that war has produced.

Yet the Fifth appeared at the height of the second world war in 1943 how at such a moment did Vaughan Williams produce a work of such serene contemplation? In fact the origins of the work date back well before even the composition of the Fourth Symphony. For much of the 30s he had worked on an opera based upon Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, before setting the project aside (he eventually completed it in 1951), and deciding to recycle some of what he had written in symphonic form.

There is a dark undertow to the symphony, which wells up most clearly in the scherzo's brusque brass punctuations and in the troubled central section of the slow movement. The landscapes that the Fifth explores are by no means as benign as they at first appear, and the finest interpreters of the work do not mistake the surface calm for the key to the whole work.”

Lawrence

mr sneff
06-07-2014, 20:36
The difficult fifth symphony :)
I'm a big RVW fan, but I struggled with this one and listened to a number of versions before voting. In the end the version that I enjoyed the most was Andre Previn and the London Symphony Orchestra, but this still didn't grab me as much as say, London Symphony, Pastoral Symphony or Symphonia Antartica. 7/10, and 10/10 for something different for the Album Club.

jandl100
07-07-2014, 06:39
Ah, the 5th. RVW's symphonic masterpiece, imo.
Emotionally powerful and beautifully formed, and beneath its exquisite exterior the slow movement is as gut-wrenchingly tragic as pretty much anything I know.

Lots of good versions, the catalogue is brimming with them, but the unexpected standout for me is Yehudi Menuhin conducting the RPO on Virgin Classics. An amazing emotional punch and superbly articulated playing, and most nicely recorded as well. :thumbsup: