Vaughan Williams: Symphony No. 8 in D minor

Hallé returns with its second volume of works by Vaughan Williams, continuing its award winning survey of British music under its Musical Director, Sir Mark Elder.

Latest release for award winning label in the English repertoire at which it excels

The release combines two highly contrasting works to provide a disc which is both moving and uplifting.

Symphony No.5 is a generally tranquil work with music influenced by Ravel, with whom Vaughan Williams had studied, and is scored for very traditional forces

Symphony No.8 is dedicated to Sir John Barbirolli and was premièred by the Hallé in 1956. It is the shortest and least serious of the symphonies and whilst not being without moments of somber mood, is generally light hearted in tone. It is has a more exotic instrumental colour, with an enhanced percussion section.

These works have long been part of Hallé’s concert repertoire under Sir Mark Elder in performances which have drawn great critical praise:

'I cannot think of another conductor around today better equipped to conduct this score than Sir Mark and he didn’t disappoint.' Michael Cookson, 'Seen and Heard International', Review of performance of Symphony No.5, Nov 2011

Vaughan Williams – Symphony No.8 – ‘Live’ Recording Of The First Performance The Symphony No.8 was dedicated to Sir John Barbirolli, and, as with the ‘Antartica’ premiere, the first performance was remarkably fine, exciting the 83-year-old composer to write on the score ‘For Glorious John, with love and admiration from Ralph’.

Perhaps the composer was somewhat uncertain regarding several aspects of the new work: at a rehearsal of the symphony, in February 1956, he approached the trumpets and asked ‘Is that all right for you? I haven’t written anything too difficult for you?’ ‘It’s all right, Dr Vaughan Williams,’ came the reply, ‘there’s nothing we can’t manage.’ Thankfully, we can hear on this preserved recording of the premiere, just what a magnificent first performance the work was given. Less than seven weeks later, Barbirolli and the Hallé inaugurated their new Pye Records contract with the first recording of the Symphony (available on SJB1021).

Vaughan Williams’s Tuba Concerto is a magnificent composition – easily the finest such Concerto ever written; the recorded HMV performance, in this collection, is outstandingly good, but the work, fine as it is, does not seem to have inspired composers to write further for the genre, which has meant that the music has tended to be unjustly ignored. A similar fate has befallen another such work by Vaughan Williams – the Five Variants on ‘Dives and Lazarus’, composed for harp and string orchestra in 1939. The collection of his music on this CD demonstrates aspects not only of the composer but of the profound grasp of ‘Glorious John’ in Vaughan Williams’s varied means of expression, for not all conductors encompass the composer’s range as Barbirolli was able to do. Less challenging in their demands are two of Vaughan Williams’s best-known shorter orchestral works – the Overture to ‘The Wasps’ and the Fantasia on ‘Greensleeves’. All these recordings offer a lasting testimony to Barbirolli's total mastery as one of the greatest conductors Britain has ever produced.

Sir John Barbirolli’s affinity with the music of Ralph Vaughan Williams was formed in his teens when he heard Gervase Elwes sing On Wenlock Edge. But it was from 1943, when he became conductor of the Hallé Orchestra in Manchester, that he developed into one of the composer’s favourite interpreters of the symphonies. Vaughan Williams described him as ‘one of those wizards who can take the dry bones of crotchets and quavers and breathe into them the breath of life’.

But closest to his heart, perhaps, was A London Symphony, partly because it is the most warmly and colourfully scored of the nine and also because it enshrines the Edwardian London in which Barbirolli spent his boyhood. No one who was fortunate enough to be present will ever forget the wonderful performance he conducted at the Cheltenham Festival in July 1958, a month before Vaughan Williams died. At the rehearsal that morning I heard RVW say to Barbirolli: ‘Do you know John, I wish I could score now like I scored then. I seemed to get a richer sound—don’t quite know how.’ On 2 May 1956, in Manchester, Barbirolli conducted the first performance of the Eighth Symphony in D minor.

The composer dedicated the work to him, and gave him the autograph full score, which he inscribed with the words, ‘For Glorious John, with love and admiration from Ralph’. Barbirolli had been rehearsing the work since the start of the year, and when Vaughan Williams went to Manchester in February to hear a play-through he found that the performance was already prepared. During rehearsals for the première, a friend commented on the effectiveness of the slight pause Barbirolli made after each of the variations in the first movement and suggested that they should be indicated in the score. ‘No,’ Vaughan Williams replied, ‘everyone else will make them too long. John does them just right, and how can I indicate what he does?’ The scoring of the Eighth may not have the Edwardian richness of A London Symphony but it has a kaleidoscopic brilliance remarkable as the work of an octogenarian. Although in some ways the slightest of the nine, the work is too easily underrated. The recording heard here was made a month after the first performance and therefore does not contain the extra cymbal clash which Vaughan Williams added to the first movement at a later date.