Vaughan Williams: A London Symphony (original 1913 version) / Butterworth: The Banks of Green Willow - London Symphony Orchestra / Richard Hickox

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Music reviews of Vaughan Williams: A London Symphony (original 1913 version) / Butterworth: The Banks of Green Willow - London Symphony Orchestra / Richard Hickox

Music Review: "A symphony by a Londoner" - uncut
Rating: 5 Stars

The symphony was given its first performance in early 1914. `You really have done it this time!' wrote his friend Gustav Holst. The full score was soon lost in mysterious circumstances but was reconstructed from the orchestral parts. After the war he revised the symphony several times, the last in 1933. The final version was about twenty minutes shorter than the original, resulting in a much leaner, tighter work. So what was `lost'?

`It [is] an enigma to me why these bars were removed, for in their magic and beauty they have caught something of London which Whistler captured in his Nocturnes.' So wrote Bernard Herrman, the American composer, referring to the slow movement. This is music of staggering beauty and occurs towards the end of the 2nd movement. In the scherzo you can hear a passage which VW called `nasty, modern stuff'. This begins at Track 4, 5:45. The orchestral writing is highly original and some people have spotted a similarity to Holst's Planet Suite- Neptune. In the final movement, the fast music is suddenly arrested by a much slower passage of almost Mahlerian anguish before returning to its familiar course. Then comes what VW called the `bad hymn tune' . It turns out to be no such thing, but instead a beautiful chorale. The epilogue is much longer and very beautiful indeed.

Lewis Foreman, in a review of this disc in the BMS* News, expresses my feelings exactly: `..one is so used to the final version that it takes several hearings to get over the shock of familiar music suddenly switching into sections that were...cut...and then back again. And just how cherishable on its own account is the material he cut? Its like being taken back to some pre-bombing London and finding long-forgotten squares and alleys and evocative vistas that we thought had gone forever'. Vaughan Williams' creativity was at such a pitch that he had too much good material - it does not sag under its own weight, rather it is bursting at the seams.

George Butterworth was a close friend of VW and offered useful criticism during the composition of the symphony. Tragically he was shot in 1916 and Vaughan Williams dedicated the work to him in memory of the younger man. Butterworth used two folk songs, which he had collected himself, in the idyll The Banks of Green Willow (1913). This short but lovely work is beautifully crafted and it is fitting that his music should share the same disc.

The performance by the LSO under Richard Hickox is superlative. The reading is broad and the hushed intensity of the strings in the quiet passages is other-worldly. Chandos has exceeded even its high standards. The notes are by Stephen Connock, Chairman of the Ralph Vaughan Williams Society and Michael Kennedy, a friend of VW who has written an excellent book about his music.

*British Music Society

Description of Vaughan Williams: A London Symphony (original 1913 version) / Butterworth: The Banks of Green Willow - London Symphony Orchestra / Richard Hickox

For starters, there's more than a quarter of an hour of extra material, much of it genuinely inspired and brimful of wondrous poetry. VW's scoring, too, was never more colorful, and it's surely not too fanciful to detect many a foreshadowing of Holst's The Planets. More significant, the work takes on a darker, tragic dimension (nowhere more potently, perhaps, than in the slow movement), and there's an astonishing passage in the expanded epilogue that even anticipates the opening movement of the 1921 Pastoral Symphony. In hindsight, VW made all the right decisions (the scherzo's second half, haunting though it is, pales next to the shuddering intensity of the revised coda), but no one should miss the opportunity to experience his original thoughts in all their epic sweep and tingling vitality. Utterly compulsive listening, then, and a "must buy" if ever I heard one. --Andrew Achenbach

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