On Saturday night in the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, John Wilson, the most musical man on the planet, conducted the RSNO in Vaughan Williams’ London Symphony. As ever with Mr Wilson, the music was approached with profound respect, and close attention to detail. All the clichéd barnacles of performative tradition were stripped away. The symphony was preceded by a prolonged silence while the conductor waited for all the rustlings and shufflings in the audience to settle down. If he showed the music respect, he expected it also from the audience, and he got it. The symphony was followed by an equally prolonged, and even more intense silence. In the intervening fifty minutes the great city in all its vivid colours came to life, arising out of silence, the contrabassi almost inaudible, perhaps depicting a view from Westminster Bridge at first light, and then bursting forth with all the vitality of the streets’ vendors and town criers, the hustle and bustle of the metropolis.
The second movement is more contemplative. Its central theme seems to evince an immense moral power. The viola and cor anglais solos were beautifully played. The movement died away with the solo viola, unconducted, drifting to silence. The third movement returns to an atmosphere of vitality and ebullience. Yet its coda has a wistfulness, and perhaps even a hint of a sense of foreboding. So we arrive at the opening to the last movement, and we can be taken aback by its severity, perhaps looking forward to the atmosphere of the fourth, and of the sixth symphonies. John Wilson conducted its principal theme at a slower tempo perhaps than is usual. The London that is depicted is the London before the Great War, yet perhaps there is a hint that the city is about to endure a prolonged agony; still the chimes of Big Ben, tellingly reiterated in single notes on the harp, tell us that somehow the great city will survive.
In a preamble prior to the concert, a second violinist told the audience that in her 22 years of playing with the RSNO, she had never played the London Symphony. It made me wonder why RVW, this towering figure of English music, despite his enduring popularity, is really not that often played by British orchestras. That made me think of my own exposure to the nine symphonies. I have played the London (second in the canon), and the fifth. I can vividly remember the first time I ever heard the fifth, when it was played by a schools’ orchestra in Prestwick, maybe around 1964. The symphony opens with a C-D octave pedal in the lower strings, upon which a duet horn motif is superimposed. It made an immediate and lasting impression. That same year I was on holiday in Hampshire. I noticed the intense green of the gentle English pastures and I remember thinking, this is what RVW 5 is all about. Adrian Boult expressed a profound sense of gratitude for RVW 5 because it appeared in 1943, when the country had most need of it. Like the Pastoral Symphony, No. 3, RVW 5 is a war-time symphony, its atmosphere of peace, and its affirmation of spiritual values made all the more poignant despite, or perhaps because of the circumstances of its creation.
Naturally I hunted for more RVW, and I recorded the Fourth Symphony from the radio – I think it was a London Prom – on to an ancient tape recorder, and I replayed it endlessly. I was taken aback by its atmosphere of violence. At the time, the BBC had just screened The Valiant Years, a resumé of the events of the Second World War narrated by Richard Burton, and I well understood the underlying meaning of the fourth symphony. But RVW was dismissive of the idea that the fourth remotely had any kind of programmatic meaning. He dedicated the symphony to somebody who was much later to become a great musical hero of mine, Sir Arnold Bax, Bax himself famous for downplaying “meaning” in music. RVW famously said of the Fourth, “I don’t know if I like it, but it’s what I meant.” For all its acerbity, and indeed brutality, it is very traditionally constructed, it seems to me overtly modelled on Beethoven’s Fifth, with a recurring four note motif, a bridge passage between third and fourth movements, and a finale that is almost a parody of the triumphal theme of the last movement of Beethoven 5. I remember first hearing the symphony in the concert hall, when the BBC Scottish performed it in the old BBC studios in Queen Margaret Drive in Glasgow.
I’ve always made a point of attending those rare concerts which feature the symphonies. Stéphane Denève, erstwhile conductor of the RSNO, championed the Sea Symphony. The first London Prom I ever attended I think was supposed to have been conducted by Sir John Barbirolli and was to include the eighth, which is dedicated to “Glorious John”, Barbirolli himself. But Barbirolli had passed away and in the event the concert was conducted by Sir Charles Groves. I was greatly taken by the first movement and its immediate immersion into the Vaughan Williams world, then the second movement for winds, third for strings, and its finale with its great array of percussion instruments. I remember Sir Charles holding up the score at the end of the performance, in homage both to Sir John, and to RVW. That concert also featured Sibelius 6 – the first time I ever heard it. It was clever programme planning. RVW had dedicated his fifth symphony, without permission, to Jean Sibelius.
Talking of the London Proms, in 2008 I attended the fiftieth anniversary concert of RVW’s death in 1958. The BBC Symphony played RVW 9. I remember having heard it in Glasgow, and the Herald critic took a mood, not at the RSNO performance, but at the symphony itself. I regret that at the time I didn’t write in to express disagreement. I love the ninth, and its Hardyesque atmosphere much evoked by the innovative use of three saxophones. I’m delighted that the symphony is being performed this year at the London Proms.
I also heard No 7, the Sinfonia Antarctica, performed most beautifully at the London Proms, the wordless soprano reaching our ears from the Gods in the Royal Albert Hall.
The Pastoral Symphony, looking back at pastoral England from the trenches in Flanders, also features a wordless female voice. I think I’ve heard it in concert, but I’m not sure. And I know I have never heard a live performance of the sixth. Perhaps its last movement, so reminiscent of RVW’s friend Gustav Holst’s Neptune, and never arising above pianissimo, is just too much to bear. Music for a nuclear winter. I think RVW would have scoffed. I have the Boult recording, in vinyl, which is followed by a short expression of thanks in the mellifluous tones of the great man himself.
Why don’t we hear these wonderful works more often? Why, come to think of it, do we never hear one of the wonderful seven symphonies (eight, counting the early symphony in F), of Arnold Bax?
It would make a change from Mahler.
jamescalumcampbell 