Ralph VAUGHAN WILLIAMS
Symphony No. 4 [32.57]
George BUTTERWORTH
A Shropshire Lad [9.55]
George ANTHEIL
Symphony No. 4 1942 [31.45]
NBCSO/Leopold Stokowski
rec from original NBC broadcasts 14 March 1943 (RVW4); 13 Feb 1944 (Butterworth
and Antheil). ADD MONO
CALA CACD0528 [74.37]
What a peculiar assemblage this is—three symphonies yoked together by nothing more than chronological proximity and Stokowski’s capacious curiosity. The director’s wartime broadcasts for NBC catch him in one of those omnivorous moods, programming music that must have sounded desperately modern to radio audiences still adjusting to Sibelius.
The Vaughan Williams Fourth arrived in America trailing clouds of bewilderment. This was 1943, remember, when RVW still meant pastoral rhapsodies and Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis to most listeners. The ferocity of this F minor symphony—its grinding dissonances, its refusal of consolation—shocked even English critics when Boult premiered it in 1935. Stokowski doesn’t soften the blow. His opening is almost brutal, those repeated Fs hammered out with a vehemence that makes you sit up. The NBC strings, not always the most refined ensemble in matters of blend, actually benefit here from a certain rawness of attack. This isn’t music that wants satin cushions.
Where the performance falters is in architectural coherence. Stokowski was never much interested in symphonic argument as such—he thought in color and gesture rather than dialectic. So the first movement’s exposition, for all its surface excitement, doesn’t quite establish the tonal conflicts that need resolving. The development section becomes a series of vivid incidents rather than an inexorable working-out. Still, the Andante moderato has genuine eloquence, that long-breathed flute melody emerging from the texture with an ache I didn’t expect from this source.
The scherzo is too slow. There, I’ve said it. Stokowski takes it at a tempo that dilutes its bitter parody—this should sting like Shostakovich, not lumber. But the finale regains urgency, building to a conclusion that leaves the tonal question genuinely unresolved, despite that final F major chord which sounds more like exhaustion than triumph.
Butterworth’s A Shropshire Lad makes an odd but not unwelcome interlude. Stokowski loved this sort of thing—English pastoralism with just enough chromatic pungency to keep American audiences from nodding off. The 1944 performance is affectionate without being cloying, though the portamenti in the strings occasionally cross the line into schmaltz. One treasures these glimpses of Butterworth’s promise, cut short in the trenches at thirty-one. The rhapsody doesn’t quite earn its eleven minutes—there’s some padding in the central section—but Stokowski finds the vein of melancholy running beneath the folk-song surfaces.
Now, the Antheil. George Antheil writing a symphony in 1942, after the Ballet mécanique and all those Parisian provocations—what did that even mean? This Fourth Symphony turns out to be a big, brash, determinedly American piece, part Copland, part Hollywood, part something entirely Antheil’s own. It opens with a motto theme that could score a wartime newsreel, then settles into an Andante that aims for nobility and achieves something closer to bluster.
Stokowski champions it with conviction, perhaps too much conviction. He wants us to hear this as a major statement, but the materials don’t quite support the ambition. The scherzo has genuine wit—Antheil could always orchestrate—but the finale’s fugal pretensions collapse into bombast. Still, there’s something touching about the whole enterprise, this enfant terrible trying to write himself into respectability, into the American symphonic tradition he’d spent his youth mocking.
The sound is what you’d expect from wartime NBC transcriptions: dry, slightly pinched in the upper strings, with some pre-echo and a general absence of hall ambience. Cala has done what it could, but these aren’t glamorous documents. They’re historical ones.
The real value here lies in the Vaughan Williams—a interpretation that, despite its flaws, captures something of the work’s savage contemporaneity, its refusal to be the pastoral symphony everyone expected. Stokowski never recorded it commercially, which makes this broadcast precious. The Butterworth is a bonus for completists. The Antheil is a curiosity that reminds us how quickly reputations shift, how a composer once considered dangerous can sound, fifty years on, almost quaint.
An indispensable disc? No. But one that earns its place in the Stokowski discography and sheds unexpected light on music-making during the war years, when even the NBC Symphony had to think about what it meant to play modern music for a nation at arms.
