Vaughan Williams Symphonies – Hickox, Davis and Elder

Two complete Vaughan Williams cycles arriving within a season of each other — this hasn’t happened before, not like this, and it forces a kind of reckoning I didn’t expect to have to make.

I’ve lived with this music for the better part of fifty years, ever since a scratchy LP of Boult conducting the Pastoral Symphony taught me that English music didn’t have to apologize for itself. Boult understood something essential: that Vaughan Williams’s visionary strain and his pungent, sometimes savage modernism were two branches of the same tree, not separate composers wearing the same tweed jacket. Barbirolli understood it too, in his own more sensuous way — that famous London Symphony with the Hallé still aches with a particular nostalgia, traffic noise and all. Any new cycle has to reckon with these ghosts.

Richard Hickox never got to finish his. He died in 2008, mid-project, and I remember thinking — uncharitably, selfishly — that something irreplaceable had been lost before its time. Chandos, to their eternal credit, didn’t abandon the enterprise; they waited, then brought in Sir Andrew Davis to complete symphonies 7 and 9 with the Bergen Philharmonic, an unexpected but genuinely inspired solution. Davis has Boult’s structural clarity without Boult’s occasional four-square stiffness, and the Sinfonia Antartica under him has real Antarctic cold in it — those wind-machine effects and the wordless soprano (Mari Eriksmoen, pure and remote, floating above the choir like something glimpsed through ice fog) never tip into kitsch, which is a real danger in this score. The Ninth, too often treated as an afterthought, a “problem” symphony that nobody quite trusts, gets from Davis the seriousness it’s owed — that saxophone trio in the first movement sounds less like Vaughan Williams slumming in a jazz club and more like an old man contemplating oblivion with a curious, unfrightened clarity.

Meanwhile Sir Mark Elder has been quietly assembling his own cycle with the Hallé — his own orchestra, the one Barbirolli made legendary — recorded live over more than a decade, concert by concert, which is a very different proposition from Chandos’s controlled studio approach. I confess I expected the Hallé engineering to sound thinner, more compressed, the inevitable compromise of live capture. I was wrong. In A Sea Symphony the Hallé brass has an unbuttoned, open-throated brilliance that the Chandos/LSO version, very fine as it is, doesn’t quite match; the choral tuttis at “Token of all brave captains” have a spontaneous surge to them that studio perfection sometimes irons flat. Roderick Williams, that most intelligent and unaffected of English baritones, brings a conversational directness to “A Passage to India” territory that recalls (dare I say it) something of the young Thomas Hampson, minus the vibrato excess.

Where the two cycles diverge most interestingly is in the pastoral works — the Third and Fifth symphonies, music that can curdle into vagueness if the maestro doesn’t trust the harmonic bones underneath the modal haze. Hickox, in his half of the Chandos survey, always trusted those bones; his Pastoral Symphony has an inwardness, almost a grief, that I associate with his understanding of the work’s origins in the composer’s memories of the Western Front — those long silences aren’t decorative, they’re wounds. Elder’s version, recorded much later in his tenure, is more luminous, less haunted, and some will prefer it for exactly that reason. I go back and forth. Ask me on a different day and I’ll give you a different answer, which I suppose is the sign of two performances that both have something真— something true — to say.

The Sixth Symphony is where I’ll adjudicate, because this is the symphony that separates conductors who merely play the notes from those who understand what’s underneath them. That finale — the famous pianissimo movement that Vaughan Williams insisted wasn’t really about the atomic bomb, whatever everyone assumed in 1948 — needs to sound genuinely depleted, ashen, not merely quiet. Hickox gets there. The tone thins out until it’s barely present at all, strings bowing at the very edge of audibility, and the silence afterward in the Chandos release felt, on first hearing, like something I shouldn’t be intruding on.

Neither set is flawless — Davis’s Fourth lacks some of the demonic bite that Previn or Boult himself brought to that extraordinary symphony’s opening dissonance, and Elder’s engineers occasionally let the Hallé’s live audience presence intrude with a cough at the worst possible moment (the hushed close of the Fifth, if you’re curious, and it’s maddening). But these are the kinds of complaints one makes about superb things, not compromised ones.

If forced to choose — and thankfully I’m not — I’d keep both. But if pressed to recommend a single entry point for a listener who has never heard these symphonies, I’d send them to Elder’s Hallé set first, if only because the visceral immediacy of live music-making seems to me closer to what Vaughan Williams was actually after: not museum pieces, but a living, breathing English tradition still capable of surprising us.