Vaughan Williams Symphony No 5 by Elder

There is a moment near the end of the first movement of Vaughan Williams’s Symphony No. 5 in d — the blazing return of the second theme, drawn from the “Alleluia” of “For All the Saints” — when you realize the music is not celebrating anything so much as having survived something. Mark Elder understands this completely. His reading of the symphony breathes, takes its time, never rushes toward consolation.

This is the finest performance of the work I have encountered in years.

Vaughan Williams composed the Fifth during the worst of the Second World War, and yet it stands apart from the darkness — not by ignoring it, but by holding open the possibility of another world. The symphony draws on material from The Pilgrim’s Progress, the opera that occupied the composer for most of his creative life, and it carries that work’s quality of patient, almost stubborn hope. Elder seems to have absorbed this entirely. His tempos in the first movement are unhurried without ever feeling slack — the music simply unfolds at its own sovereign pace, like light moving across a landscape rather than a spotlight thrown at it.

The Hallé’s strings have a sheeny, luminous quality here. Gossamer is the right word for their pianissimos in the development, where the woodwind suddenly turn ominous — not stormy, exactly, but weighted with something you can’t quite name. The climax, when it arrives, feels earned rather than imposed. Elder’s brass don’t just get loud; they mean it.

Comparison with Barbirolli is inevitable. The old man conducted the premiere in 1943 and led the very first commercial album — with this same orchestra, the following year. His is the interpretation against which all others must still reckon, and its inner fire, its quality of conviction driven from somewhere deep and private, remains unmatched on its own terms. But Elder’s approach is different in kind, not merely degree. Where Barbirolli burns, Elder illuminates. Where Barbirolli’s development section feels elemental — almost biblical in its fury — Elder stands back and lets things evolve, trusting the music to find its own pressure. It’s a more contemplative view of the score, and on its own terms, it is wholly convincing.

The Scherzo is alert and wonderfully light — busy but never hectic, the orchestration revealed with a deftness that Vaughan Williams’s admirers rarely get to hear so clearly. The first Trio accumulates gradually out of brass-and-woodwind bumbling, oddly endearing. The second has bounce and bluster, though Barbirolli’s version was racier and more mischievous — you can hear the old man grinning. Elder’s closing pages dissolve more quietly, as if the music simply ran out of reasons to continue in that vein.

The “Romanza” opens in a hush that is almost liturgical.

As for the Eighth Symphony — a work that never quite gets its due — Elder and the Hallé give it a rendition of rhythmic precision and real character. Vaughan Williams wrote it in his early eighties, and it is by any measure a strange, exhilarating piece: four movements that are almost willfully diverse in texture and mood, from the opening “Fantasia” — a set of variations without a theme, as the composer himself described it — to a finale scored entirely for tuned percussion and strings. It is eccentric and sometimes puzzling music, and it rewards exactly the kind of clear-eyed, unsentimental advocacy Elder brings to it.

A distinguished disc. Buy it.