Vaughan Williams: Sinfonia antartica – Boult

There is something almost perverse about the fact that Vaughan Williams’s most cinematic, most extroverted symphony began life as film music — the score for Scott of the Antarctic — and ended up as one of his gnarliest, most ambivalent essays in the genre. The Sinfonia antartica wears its origins uneasily. Boult knew this better than anyone, having championed the composer for decades. His 1953 Decca recording, reissued now by Pristine in a transfer that opens up the Kingsway Hall ambience without falsifying it, remains a document of real authority. It is not, by a distance, the most polished reading the work has received.

Margaret Ritchie’s wordless soprano floats in from a great and cold distance, and Boult accompanies her wind-machine desolation with playing that never curdles into mere atmosphere. That is the trap this symphony sets for interpreters: the temptation to let the picturesque elements — the wind machine, the offstage voices, Gielgud’s spoken epigraphs — overwhelm the musical argument underneath. Boult resists it. He treats the piece as a symphony first, a tone poem second. That is exactly right, because Vaughan Williams himself seems to have been unsure which he was writing.

Gielgud’s contributions are a curiosity now, dated in the way spoken interpolations in orchestral works tend to date. But there’s no denying the frisson of that voice, cut glass and utterly unsentimental, introducing each movement like a man reading dispatches from the front. Some collectors treasure these narrations; others reach for the skip button. I incline toward tolerance. They are period pieces within a period piece, and Pristine’s remastering gives them a presence and bloom the LPs never quite managed.

The famous icefall in the “Landscape” movement — that sudden, engulfing organ entry — has always posed a sonic problem on record, and it poses one here too. The instrument at Kingsway Hall could turn shrill and metallic under studio conditions, and engineers of the day often didn’t quite know what to do with it. Culshaw’s team caught something of the terror Vaughan Williams wanted, but also something unwanted: a hard, almost electronic edge that never sounded quite like an actual pipe organ in an actual room. Pristine’s ambient stereo processing takes the worst of the glare off without pretending the problem doesn’t exist. It’s an improvement, not a cure. Listeners wanting a fully naturalistic organ sound will need to look to later versions — Previn’s LSO album, for instance, or Haitink’s with the same orchestra decades on. Neither of those conductors, for my money, finds quite the bleak grandeur Boult brings to the final “Epilogue,” with its slow dissolve into nothingness.

The Symphony No. 8, recorded in true stereo three years later, is a different animal altogether. Vaughan Williams in his eighties had lost none of his appetite for orchestral mischief. This is the symphony with the “vast array of all available” percussion, as the composer put it with typical dryness, and the famous set of variations for wind alone in the second movement, and a finale that dissolves suddenly and disarmingly into pure diatonic joy — bells and all. Boult’s account has an unforced wit that younger interpreters sometimes miss, chasing profundity where the composer wanted only high spirits. The Cavatina third movement, scored for strings alone, gets from the LPO strings playing of real tonal warmth, the kind of sustained cantabile this orchestra, whatever its other inconsistencies during this era, always seemed to produce for Boult specifically. There was a rapport there built over thirty years. You can hear it.

Stereo suits this music better than mono suits the Antartica, obviously, so the improvement in the Eighth is correspondingly less dramatic in Pristine’s hands — there was less to fix. But strings have gained air, the antiphonal separation of the wind chorale registers more clearly than on any LP transfer I’ve owned, and the tam-tam and celesta effects in the finale come through with a specificity older pressings simply didn’t offer.

Is this a first choice for either symphony today? Probably not, if you want state-of-the-art digital sound — Andrew Davis, Slatkin, and Hickox all offer modern recordings with cleaner organ tone and more spacious engineering. But Boult’s is the reading with the composer looking over his shoulder. Pristine has done what can be done with limited raw material, and done it tactfully. Recommended, with the reservations any historical document requires, and treasured, finally, for reasons that have nothing to do with fidelity at all.