Vaughan Williams: Symphonies Nos. 3 & 4; Fantasia on Greensleeves

Editorial Reviews
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Constant Lambert, the noted English composer, critic, and alcoholic, referred to Vaughan Williams's Pastoral Symphony as sounding like "a cow looking over a barn gate." An immortal quip, no doubt, but not really applicable. The countryside being illustrated isn't English at all, but rather French--the composer was stationed there during the First World War, and this provided the music's initial inspiration. The Fourth Symphony, by contrast, sounds like an imaginary soundtrack to Godzilla Eats London. It's very violent (and very exciting), and even the composer wasn't sure if he liked it. If you like your music lean and mean, then this symphony's for you. Both works are marvelously performed and recorded. --David Hurwitz

Vaughan Williams: Symphonies Nos. 3 & 4; Fantasia on Greensleeves, Music, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Leonard Slatkin, Kenneth Smith, Nigel Black, Philharmonia Orchestra of London, Linda Hohenfeld, Mark David, John Chambers, Hugh Bean, 20th/21st Century Orchestral Music, 20th/21st Century Symphony, Classical, Classical Music, Orchestral, Symphonic
Ralph Vaughan Williams: Symphonies Nos. 3 & 5
Average customer rating: 5 out of 5 stars
  • Classic contemplation
  • I love Vaughan Williams' music. Period.
  • Powerful and serene V W
  • Two Extrordinay Symphonies
  • TRANSCENDENTAL VAUGHAN WILLIAMS
 Ralph Vaughan Williams: Symphonies Nos. 3 & 5

Manufacturer: EMI Classics
ProductGroup: Music
Binding: Audio CD

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

ASIN: B000002S2P
Release Date: 1991-09-12

Tracks:

  1. A Pastoral Symphony: I. Molto moderato
  2. A Pastoral Symphony: II. Lento moderato
  3. A Pastoral Symphony: III. Moderato pesante
  4. A Pastoral Symphony: IV. Lento
  5. Symphony No. 5 In D: I. Preludio (Moderato)
  6. Symphony No. 5 In D: II. Scherzo (Presto)
  7. Symphony No. 5 In D: III. Romanza (Lento0
  8. Symphony No. 5 In D: IV. Passacaglia (Moderato)

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These are two of Vaughan Williams's greatest symphonies. (Some think his Fifth is his best.) The Third Symphony (1922), subtitled "The Pastoral Symphony," brings to mind the lush imagery of the English countryside and is filled with heartbreaking melodies. (It was written in part while the composer was in the service in WWI.) His Fifth Symphony (1943) is an outgrowth of the music from his great opera, The Pilgrim's Progress, eventually published in 1951. In part, the symphony is a return to his warmer style, a turn away from the acerbic Fourth Symphony, which the public hated. And, yes, it probably is his greatest symphony. --Paul Cook

Customer Reviews:

4 out of 5 stars Classic contemplation.......2007-01-06

Boult and RVW go way way back, of course, so he offers authoritative performances just about all the time. Here the Pastoral is the better performance, a lovely and sensitive reading of a very elusive work. The Fifth is a little slack, unfortunately, but if you can accept that it's still a warm and loving rendition.

5 out of 5 stars I love Vaughan Williams' music. Period........2004-04-24

The critics really make it hard for those of us who love the music of Ralph Vaughan Williams. It's bad enough that Aaron Copland once said that listening to Vaughan Williams' Symphony No. 5 was like staring at a cow for 45 minutes. It's even worse that Tim Page, music critic for the Washington Post, likened The Lark Ascending--my nomination for the most purely beautiful piece of music ever written--to a lovely but vapid woman you're embarrassed to remember you were once in love with. But the absolutely last straw has been broken: the author of a new, violently condemnatory biography of the late Anthony Burgess uses Burgess' choice of Vaughan Williams for his appearance on the BBC's "Desert Island Discs" as proof positive of the essential mediocrity of Burgess' mind.
OK, maybe I'm mediocre too (and I'd be perfectly happy to be as mediocre as Anthony Burgess!). But I STILL consider Vaughan Williams one of the most remarkable composers of the 20th century, and certainly one of the most consistently delightful. His Third (Pastoral) and Fifth Symphonies have a soulful richness and luminosity few 20th-century works can match, and it's hard to imagine finer or more idiomatic versions of them than those conducted by the late Sir Adrian Boult. Particularly at its mid-level price, this CD is a must for anyone interested in English music.

5 out of 5 stars Powerful and serene V W.......2002-09-25

These are two qualities melted one into another that outline symphony 3 "Pastoral" and 5. The scope is musically generous, rich, while maintaining the substance of everything this composer did. The conducting , as does the playing, is matched or surpassed only by a few peers. Two great pieces with solemn melodies, with dark/light stamina, a disquietude longing for pastoral respite.

5 out of 5 stars Two Extrordinay Symphonies.......2002-03-23

The Third and Fifth symphonies of Vaughan Williams are among his most peaceful and serene of his works. I once heard a commentator on public radio say that he listened to the Fifth symphony before boarding a plane. If the unthinkable happened and the plane when down, he contended that he would be better prepared to accept his death have reached so serene a state. The Fifth was written when Vaughan Williams was in his early 70ýs, and the mood of reflection and peace associated with the music made may think the composer had entered a state of restful reflection. They did not dream that he would write four more symphonies that would prove Vaughan Williams had more fire in him than suspected.

The Third symphony (Pastoral) also has a similar feeling of reflection. It is odd that it was written in France during the First World War while Vaughan Williams was in the ambulance corps. I think of it as hearkening back to a time before the war when the French countryside, now blasted by shells, was a peaceful place.

These recordings are among the best conducted by Sir Adrian Boult, and although they date from the early 1950s they have been so beautifully remastered that it will not matter they are not digital recordings. The subtle orchestral shadings in both symphonies are magical and have rarely been caught so precisely. A must for those interested in Vaughan Williamsýs music.

5 out of 5 stars TRANSCENDENTAL VAUGHAN WILLIAMS.......2001-07-19

I remember my first encounter with Vaughan Williams; it was, of course, his Symphony No. 2 ("London")--- and doesn't it always seem to be THIS particular symphony, especially when you're young, like I was, and open to music you may never have heard. Naturally, I thought it was grand, and it is. As is his Symphony No. 7 ("Sinfonia Antartica"), which I discovered soon afterwards and also felt thrilled by. As a novice, I fell easily under the accessibility of these works--- and the spells they cast. I would never give up this period of some thirty years ago, or the hunger that drove me to search out more and more music, or the growth that it incurred.

However, time and age intervene, as they are apt to do, and our vision widens, our experience broadens, life, with its diverse pleasure and pain, enables us or forces us to open ourselves even further. Thus I came to VW's Symphonies No.'s 3 and 5, not because I had never heard them or owned them. To the contrary, I collected three complete sets of the VW Symphonies, in my LP days, the Boult included; but I never REALLY heard them. And these two symphonies in particular never really "touched" me... barely even listened to them... until now, years and years later.

Now they float over my soul like the dusk of a late autumn afternoon--- when my heart is filled with the wonder and puzzlement of seasons, years, decades gone by--- and the spirit, too, admits that the evening shadows are indeed growing longer and suddenly the sense of things past becomes an intense, yearning nostalgia. [I wish that in my twenties I had had, emotionally, what I do now in my early fifties--- and the wisdom to go hand-in-hand with it! But those regrets are better left for another time.]

With the ageless Sir Adrian at the podium, Vaughan Williams' Symphonies 3 and 5 are as beautiful, and bountiful, a coupling as one could wish for--- and in peerless performances like these, they bring tears to the eyes.

From the haunting opening bars of the "Pastoral," so reminiscent of "The Lark Ascending," we are enveloped by such a languid melancholy, lulled pervasively into such a womb-like and secure "place," that the temptation to stay "in the moment" is more than simply an overpowering desire: it is a need that arises from the innermost part of us. Boult's flowing sense of orchestral color, nuance and detail, his hushed and ethereal handling of VW's mournfully heartfelt passages, his complete and utter sympathy with composition and composer--- all --- make this "Pastoral" something that beggars description.

And the Fifth Symphony? This is, absolutely, VW's greatest achievement and, at that point in his life, the synthesis of everything he was--- and the promise of everything he would, as we know, become. What an ebb and flow exist in this work! What glorious swells of lyricism and emotion wash over us; what an all-surrounding atmosphere encompasses! Like a spiritual "sister" to the "Pastoral," listening to the Fifth Symphony is like drinking from the wellspring of life--- and becoming as one renewed, reborn --- a powerfil simile for one of the symphonic milestones of the twentieth century.

EMI has joined together VW's most wonderous of symphonies and, under the baton of Sir Adrian (with grand sound from both the New Philharmonia and London Philharmonic), has secured a definitive place in the VW catalogue for both on this most magnificent of CDs.

[Running time: 71:28]
Vaughan Williams: Symphonies Nos. 3 "Pastoral" & No. 6
Average customer rating: 5 out of 5 stars
  • A Vaughan Williams Discovery (Symphonies Nos. 1 & 3)
 Vaughan Williams: Symphonies Nos. 3 "Pastoral" & No. 6

Manufacturer: Naxos
ProductGroup: Music
Binding: Audio CD

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ASIN: B0000013XE
Release Date: 1994-10-04

Tracks:

  1. Symphony No. 3 'Pastoral': Molto moderato
  2. Symphony No. 3 'Pastoral': Lento moderato
  3. Symphony No. 3 'Pastoral': Moderato pesante
  4. Symphony No. 3 'Pastoral': Lento - Moderato maestoso
  5. Symphony No. 6 In E Minor: Allegro
  6. Symphony No. 6 In E Minor: Moderato
  7. Symphony No. 6 In E Minor: Scherzo: Allegro vivace
  8. Symphony No. 6 In E Minor: Epilogue: Moderato

Customer Reviews:

5 out of 5 stars A Vaughan Williams Discovery (Symphonies Nos. 1 & 3).......2000-10-19

On the surface, the Third (1922) and Sixth (1947) Symphonies by Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) could not contrast more starkly. Subtitled "Pastoral," the Third appears to exemplify the notion of "English music" as a low-key celebration of rural lifeways and folk-song in dialect; the rather more abstract Sixth seems to be the eruptive reaction of an aging philosopher to the state of perpetual, institutionalized war ("Cold War") that followed the victory over Germany and Japan in 1945. The Third undulates quietly in minor modes while the Sixth explodes with dissonance and violence. Consider, however, the fourth-movement Finales of both symphonies: Each proceeds quietly, rarely rising above "piano" in the dynamic indications; both equivocate between major and minor and ultimately seem to revert to minor mode. Vaughan Williams made it clear that the Finale of the Third commemorated his service in the Ambulance Corps in France in World War I, and can certainly strike the listener as elegiac in tone; commentators imputed to the Finale of the Sixth the notion that it depicted a world blasted and depopulated by atomic weapons. Vaughan Williams denied this, but only by quoting Prospero's oblique acknowledgment of mortality from Shakespeare's "The Tempest": "We are such stuff as dreams are made on and our little life is rounded in a sleep." In fact, the Third and Sixth Symphonies belong to a single aesthetic, one in which the salient event is the disappearance of old ways of life having to do with the immemorial rhythms of the countryside. It makes sense, then, to couple these two symphonies, as Kees Bakels has done in his Naxos survey of the Vaughan Williams symphonies. The benchmarks against which new recorded performances must compete are the recordings by Sir Adrian Boult, who set down the Sixth as early as 1949 and made the first recording of the "Pastoral" in the early 1950s. Bakels has a more supple way with these scores than Boult, who could be wiry and stiff (although powerful and forthright). As the Boult interpretations become scarce, Bakels' newer, better sounding, and considerably less expensive readings become more attractive. His Third is lean and modern and yet movingly nostalgic when the wordless soprano joins the orchestra in the Finale. He calculates the performance to deemphasize the work's association with gentler scores like the "Norfolk Rhapsody" or "The Lark Ascending." Bakels' Sixth, while slower in the First Movement than the original 1949 recording under Boult, manages to be even more bellicose and cataclysmic. Save for the Finale, all of movements take longer under Bakels than under Boult, but this results in no slackening of the tension. Fine performances in fine sound.
Vaughan Williams: Symphonies Nos. 3 "Pastoral" & 5
Average customer rating: 5 out of 5 stars
  • The highest degree
 Vaughan Williams: Symphonies Nos. 3 "Pastoral" & 5

Manufacturer: Karussell
ProductGroup: Music
Binding: Audio CD

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ASIN: B000025UMG
Release Date: 1995-01-01

Customer Reviews:

5 out of 5 stars The highest degree.......2003-10-05

These performances of two great symphonies by Brit composer Vaughan Williams are part of the legendary Decca sessions, from the early 1950's. The fact that it was recorded inside a very good sounding Kingsway Hall did help even if we're talking of monophonic sound. Producers John Culshaw and Ken Wilkinson were doing great things in those days. The composer was present at the sessions, thus giving the recordings a sort of 'endorsement' if you will. There never was--and there will never be--a better version of the Fifth Symphony. The momentum, playing, conducting and accuracy of the recording itself all conspired to produce an account worthy of cult status. The highest degree in musicality, this is what Sir Adrian Boult and the London Philharmonic Orchestra did achieve ; and the results are even better than my current favourite--Boult's 1960s version on EMI (also with the London Philharmonic Orchestra). After all, the old recordings of the Third and Fifth symphonies belong to the 'Golden Age' of mono and stereo, the 'Kennedy-era', which created many legends and was rarely surpassed since then. Among the pioneering deeds regarding the Symphony No.5, Sir John Barbirolli's wartime recording (1944), with his relatively modest but dexterous Halle Orchestra, remains an exceptional reading, one with grandeur and solemn grace. And I do not think the latter betters, on all counts, Boult's legendary performance. For sure, Barbirolli's is also worthy of the term 'legendary' but some sonic limitations play havoc with the 1944 Halle recording. From a musical standpoint, the Philharmonia's effort, from 1962 (again with Barbirolli at the helm), is also very good--it is a superb reading--but does not equal, or let alone approach, his own Halle. All things considered, I still prefer Boult's 1960s LPO account over the 1962 Philharmonia (both released by EMI), perhaps just the way I favoured Boult's 1953 recording over the 1944 Barbirolli. Great 'modern-day recordings' of the Fifth Symphony include a splendid Thomson/LSO on Chandos, as well as a classic Vernon Handley/RLPO and the gorgeous Previn/RPO (on Telarc). I do NOT care for the Haitink/LPO (EMI). The ever fascinating Third Symphony ("Pastoral") received a very decent interpretation from Boult (1950's), but here I do prefer his arguably unsurpassed version for EMI--with the New Philharmonia Orchestra. In any case, the "Pastoral" probably never 'sounded' better than under Boult, above all his two 1960s versions (the other was done with the BBC Symphony Orchestra), not forgetting a very fine version from Vernon Handley (RLPO, EMI Records). Get this one for the Fifth, above all, it is essential VW.
Vaughan Williams: Symphonies Nos. 3-6
Average customer rating: 5 out of 5 stars
  • Absolutely wonderful
 Vaughan Williams: Symphonies Nos. 3-6
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Manufacturer: Bmg Int'l
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ASIN: B00005TP0K
Release Date: 2002-04-23

Customer Reviews:

5 out of 5 stars Absolutely wonderful.......2006-02-03

Syms 3 to 6 are the central great works by RVW.

These are absolutely wonderful performances, very well recorded.

The 1st mvmnt of the Pastoral Symphony rarely fails to bring tears to my eyes. #5 is similarly performed with great beauty. The violent ones, #4 and #6, are also performed brilliantly.

Can't go wrong with this.
Vaughan Williams: Symphonies Nos. 3 & 4; Fantasia on Greensleeves
Average customer rating: 4 out of 5 stars
  • An interesting combination of RVW works
 Vaughan Williams: Symphonies Nos. 3 & 4; Fantasia on Greensleeves

Manufacturer: RCA
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  1. Vaughan Williams: Symphonies Nos. 5 & 6

ASIN: B000003F9P
Release Date: 1993-07-13

Tracks:

  1. Fant On Greensleeves - Philharmonia Orch/Leonard Slatkin
  2. A Pastoral Sym (No.3): Molto Moderato - Linda Hohenfeld/Hugh Bean/John Chambers/Jane Marshall
  3. A Pastoral Sym (No.3): Lento Moderato - Linda Hohenfeld/Mark David/Nigel Black
  4. A Pastoral Sym (No.3): Moderato Pesante/Presto - Linda Hohenfeld
  5. A Pastoral Sym (No.3):Lento: Moderato Maestoso - Linda Hohenfeld
  6. Sym No.4 in f: Allegro - Philharmonia Orch/Leonard Slatkin
  7. Sym No.4 in f: Andante Moderato - Kenneth Smith
  8. Sym No.4 in f: Scherzo: Allegro Molto - Philharmonia Orch/Leonard Slatkin
  9. Sym No.4 in f: Finale Con Epilogo Fugato: Allegro Molto - Philharmonia Orch/Leonard Slatkin

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Constant Lambert, the noted English composer, critic, and alcoholic, referred to Vaughan Williams's Pastoral Symphony as sounding like "a cow looking over a barn gate." An immortal quip, no doubt, but not really applicable. The countryside being illustrated isn't English at all, but rather French--the composer was stationed there during the First World War, and this provided the music's initial inspiration. The Fourth Symphony, by contrast, sounds like an imaginary soundtrack to Godzilla Eats London. It's very violent (and very exciting), and even the composer wasn't sure if he liked it. If you like your music lean and mean, then this symphony's for you. Both works are marvelously performed and recorded. --David Hurwitz

Customer Reviews:

4 out of 5 stars An interesting combination of RVW works.......1999-08-04

This exploration of Greensleaves by RVW is amusing and is well executed.

Symphony no 3 is a very moving and deeply troubling work that requires concentration so as not to be overwhelmed. This recording does reflect the nature of the work and its better qualities.

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