There is a moment in the slow movement of Vaughan Williams’s Symphony No. 5 in D major when the music seems to stop being music altogether — when it becomes instead a kind of sustained breath, held by the whole orchestra, fragile and enormous at once. Mark Elder and the Hallé find that moment. They hold it. And then they let it go, which is exactly right.
Vaughan Williams was in his late sixties when he composed the Fifth, and the work carries the weight of a man who had already looked at enough of the world to know what he wanted to say about it. The year of its premiere, 1943, is inescapable context. London was burning, or had been. The composer himself conducted the Proms premiere, in a city still raw from the Blitz, and whatever the program notes said about pastoral serenity, anyone who sat in that hall knew better. This is not a symphony of peace so much as a symphony about the memory of peace — a distinction that separates the great conductors from the merely competent ones, because the merely competent ones play only the serenity and leave out the grief underneath it.
Elder doesn’t make that mistake.
The “Preludio” opens with horns — two of them, muted almost to thought — over a bass-register that seems to rise out of the ground rather than be placed upon it. What’s remarkable about the Hallé’s playing here is the quality of attention: nobody is simply sustaining a note; everyone is listening to everyone else. The music’s famous modal ambiguity, those archaic harmonies that always seem to be reaching back toward something Vaughan Williams himself had never quite heard, registers not as nostalgia but as genuine longing. That’s a harder trick than it sounds.
The “Scherzo” — which Vaughan Williams borrowed from his abandoned opera The Pilgrim’s Progress, as he did much else in the Fifth — is taut and slightly menacing under Elder, the rhythmic displacements angular rather than merely playful. Good. Too many conductors smooth the edges off this movement and leave you with something merely busy.
Then the “Romanza.” This is the movement that breaks you, if it’s going to. The oboe writing and the cor anglais writing — played here with real distinction by Stéphane Rancourt and Thomas Davey — could only have come from Vaughan Williams, who understood those instruments not as pastoral props but as vehicles for a specific kind of English melancholy that goes back past Elgar, past Holst, past anyone, back to something pre-verbal. The solo violin line near the movement’s close, taken by Lyn Fletcher, is spun out with exquisite care. The whole passage carries the feeling of an elegy — not for a person, but for a way of being in the world.
The “Passacaglia” finale is the trickiest movement to bring off — its strange, circling certainty, its refusal to resolve in any conventional way — and Elder navigates it with the confidence of someone who has thought hard and long about what the music is actually doing. Which it is: not concluding, exactly, but arriving somewhere it always knew it was going.
The Symphony No. 8 in d minor — composed a decade later, when Vaughan Williams was past eighty and had somehow become more experimental, not less — is a different kind of challenge. Where the Fifth asks for depth, the Eighth asks for precision and a certain wiry energy. Elder and the Hallé deliver both. The Eighth is, among other things, a percussion showcase — Vaughan Williams deploys tuned percussion with an almost Bartókian specificity — and the Hallé players handle it with relish rather than mere accuracy.
As a coupling, the two works make a kind of argument: here is a composer who spent sixty years being himself, whose late style is not a retreat from his middle style but an extension of it. That argument comes through clearly on this disc.
Competing versions? Boult’s recordings — especially the late EMI sessions — remain the baseline against which everything else is measured, and probably always will be. Thomson on Chandos had real insight into the Eighth. But Elder belongs in that company now. The Hallé, for all that it is a Manchester orchestra and not the London Philharmonic, plays this music as if it grew up inside them.
A distinguished release. I hope they finish the cycle.
