Ralph Vaughan Williams

- Valiant-for-truth *
- Symphony No. 5 in D
- The Pilgrim Pavement *
- Hymn-tune Prelude on Song 13 by Orlando Gibbons (arr. Glatz)
- The Twenty-third Psalm * (arr. Churchill)
- Prelude and Fugue in c

* Richard Hickox Singers
London Symphony Orchestra/Richard Hickox
Chandos CHAN9666 Total time: 70:48

Summary for the Busy Executive: Redefining beauty.

Vaughan Williams rarities nestle against a recording of perhaps his most
popular symphony.  Most of the items on the program link one way or another
to Vaughan Williams's nearly life-long fascination with Bunyan's Pilgrim's
Progress.  The work appealed to the composer not solely because of its
magnificent prose, but also because of its close ties to the intellectual
background of the Fabian Socialist movement during the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries.

The Pilgrim Pavement and the Hymn-tune Prelude on Gibbons are absolutely
new to me, and I've made Vaughan Williams an active part of over forty
years of collecting recordings.  I can find no mention of them in standard
reference of Kennedy's Life and Works, although they get brief mention
in R. V. W., Ursula Vaughan Williams's biography of her husband.  The
composer wrote The Pilgrim Pavement on commission from the Cathedral of
St.  John the Divine in Manhattan.  As the liner notes point out, unusually
for him, he set words that he didn't choose.  He thought he needed the
occasional discipline.  The words are one small step above bloody awful,
and any power the piece has derives solely from the composer.  Apparently,
he struggled with the text and later tried to have his anthem withdrawn.
Other signs of Vaughan Williams's sense of discipline come to the fore in
the suitability of the work for good amateurs, choristers and organist.
Although professionals most likely would do better, it's something that
still comes off for a decent church choir, and it has musical interest
besides.  It may not rise to the level of Vaughan Williams's best, but it
fascinates me anyway for the way it sets the poetry.  Vaughan Williams uses
it as an occasion for an extreme approach to reconciling speech rhythms and
musical meters.  The poet uses hymn metrical patterns for the text, which
suit a regular musical phrasing.  Vaughan Williams, however, comes up with
one irregular phrase after another, at one extended point, moving along in
either seven or five large beats in a poetic meter of four.  The speech
rhythm wins out over the meter.  This tendency became more pronounced as
Vaughan Williams got older, culminating in his Pilgrim's Progress
"morality" (as he designated his opera) and in the Ten Blake Songs.

Vaughan Williams wrote the Gibbons Hymn-tune Prelude for Harriet
Cohen, the same musician for whom he composed his piano concerto.
Obviously, he admired her playing.  Here we have the piano miniature
in a composer-approved arrangement for strings by one Helen Glatz.  It's
three minutes of pure lovely, a typical Vaughan Williams elaboration of a
simple figure against a tune in long notes, like the better-known prelude
on "Rhosymedre." Listening to the work and especially to the flowingly
changing background-foreground relationship of accompaniment and tune puts
me strongly in mind of the Bach chorale preludes.

John Churchill has arranged part of Act IV of The Pilgrim's Progress ("The
Shepherds of the Delectable Mountains") as a setting of Psalm 23 for mixed
chorus and soprano solo.  It's a lovely job, too.  The opera is unlikely
to receive a staging at a theater near you any time soon, and this kind
of tinkering strikes me as as good a way as any to disseminate the music
to audiences.  I should say, however, that Churchill necessarily has
simplified the original considerably.  The opera scene is a contrapuntal
glory with the psalm ("The Voice of a Bird") providing background
commentary (like Bunyan's own marginalia of Biblical quotation) to
Pilgrim's wonder at the Delectable Mountains and with a solo string group
singing like birds over the orchestra - a Vaughan Williams take on Wagner's
"Waldrauschen." Churchill works with great acuity.  I complain only that
it sounds like Vaughan Williams's music, but not particularly like Vaughan
Williams's choral music.  I find an over-reliance on standard choral
strategies of tune accompaniment, which, after a certain early point,
Vaughan Williams abandoned.  In the late a cappella choral music
especially, each part is equally important.  Nothing stays completely
in the background.

The Prelude and Fugue in c has been recorded in its full orchestral dress
at least once before, conducted by Vernon Handley.  Vaughan Williams
originally wrote them as organ pieces as early as 1921 and orchestrated
them in 1930.  Michael Kennedy once pointed out that Vaughan Williams
tended to innovate and change in relatively small pieces.  Here, we can
discover signposts in the prelude to such works as the Fourth Symphony
(1934) and in the fugue to Flos campi (1925) and to the passacaglia that
closes the Fifth Symphony (1942).  Indeed, the fugue's subject is almost
a twin to the opening theme of Flos campi.  The treatments, however,
differ startlingly, Flos campi (with its bitonal opening) owing less to
traditional counterpoint and more to a vision of simultaneous planes of
sound.  Historically, the Prelude and Fugue shows that Vaughan Williams's
development didn't really progress linearly.  The rough view of his music
of the Twenties - "pastoral" and "contemplative" - fails to take in the
many works that fall outside:  the violin concerto, Sancta Civitas, Old
King Cole, and this one.  Because of the Fourth Symphony, writers tend to
view the Prelude and Fugue as an adumbration, rather than as something
aesthetically complete in its own right.  It certainly doesn't have the
finish of the symphony.  In other words, Vaughan Williams mined the musical
vein deeper later on.  However, it's still a crackling good piece.

Vaughan Williams wrote Valiant-for-truth on the death of a close friend,
Dorothy Longman.  This is the first fully satisfactory commercial recording
I know of - amazing evidence of ignorance and neglect.  The motet ranks
with such acknowledged masterpieces as the Mass in g and A Vision of
Aeroplanes - in other words, as great a choral work as Vaughan Williams
ever achieved.  It's difficult as sin to perform - mostly quiet,
practically at the edge of hearing, and slow, with long stretches of unison
singing, and then blazing counterpoint at the end as "all the trumpets
sounded for him, on the other side." Intonation, a command of decrescendo
and true unison, and just plain running out of breath become the technical
challenges singers must meet.  My favorite recording was made by amateurs,
and since you'll never hear it, there's no point in my going on about it.
The Hickox, however, is probably as good as we are going to get, and it's
by no means terrible.  It's just that the amateurs had months' more
rehearsal time in which to master interpretation than most professionals
get.  They sang as if the music had bonded to their insides - more than
a fine performance.  The Hickox Singers do well enough, conveying the
stature of the piece, but their dynamic range is way too constricted.  They
never really get soft enough, and their intonation, although solid, never
contributes to the ecstasy of the positively magical chord progressions the
composer discovered.  I hope, however, that the Hickox recording makes this
work better known and encourages many more performances.

If you already own Barbirolli, Boult, or Previn, do you really need this
recording of Vaughan Williams's Fifth? I would say so, emphatically.  This
performance goes to the front of the line, even ahead of those earlier
classic accounts.  It's warmer than Boult, not as passionate as Barbirolli,
and far more assured in its textural balance than Previn.  Frankly, I was
surprised.  While I've admired Hickox in Vaughan Williams repertoire,
many times something seemed to go wrong with his recordings.  The recent
"London" Symphony suffered I think because of the use of the composer's
original score, rather than the revision.  While Hickox performed a
valuable service in making the score known, the diffuseness at times
of the composer's first thoughts played havoc with the narrative flow.
Hickox's accounts of Dona nobis pacem and Sancta Civitas were marred by
the self-indulgence of Bryn Terfel, who seemed incapable of putting out
a line free of scoops and swoops.

Hickox offers something I really didn't believe possible:  a new view of
this symphony and perhaps of the composer himself.  We seem to have gotten
more such recordings recently, with Haitink penetrating the scores of the
Eighth and Ninth Symphonies and finding new valid interpretive threads.
Vaughan Williams began the Fifth in his late sixties.  He had been working
for several decades on his theater version of The Pilgrim's Progress but
found himself a long way from the finish line.  He had no way to know
whether he would ever finish and so decided to adapt some of the ideas to
an orchestral work (in the Forties, he also composed a radio version that
used some of the opera's material).  Hickox's account gains immeasurably
from the fact that he obviously knows the opera very well (he has recorded
a version for Chandos - CHAN9625(2) - which I haven't heard).

Most conductors tend to sentimentalize, viewing the symphony as one long
benediction.  Light in Vaughan Williams's music seldom comes without dark,
however, and the symphony, like the opera, has its demonic moments.  In
the opening movement, for example, toward the end of the second subject
group (for those of you keeping your sonata score card), there sounds a
descending "Phrygian" third (Eb - Db - C), associated in the opera with the
forces of Hell, especially Beelzebub.  It turns out that Vaughan Williams
relates this idea to the serene horn call which begins the work.  Hickox
nails these things, to the extent of bringing out the demonic motive in
the first pages of the score - something I've never heard before.  Hickox
also emphasizes that this is a contrapuntal symphony.  Many critics seem
to regard the composer as a mere rhapsodist.  While he has his ecstatic
moments, Vaughan Williams is really one of the most solid builders around.
He has so completely mastered counterpoint, that not only do many people
miss it, so completely does it serve expression, but he actually has the
reputation as a weak contrapuntalist.  The exposition of this symphony,
for example, is usually taken as singing pure and simple.  Actually, the
composer has conceived it as the sounding of similar musical lines at
slightly different times.  The techniques of canon and stretto he applies
in unconventional ways.  This is not pseudo-Baroque pastiche.  Instead, one
thinks of several singers starting with a similar idea and individually
"winging it." Again, Vaughan Williams isn't usually interested in
contrapuntal display for its own sake.  He has thought of music first.  His
finely-honed contrapuntal skills allow him to think of more possibilities
and to intensify an essentially melodic form of expression.  In this, he
reminds me of Brahms, Mahler, Nielsen, and, his favorite, Bach.  Hickox
captures the emotional tone perfectly from the opening horn call:  he
always holds something back, and the reserve paradoxically implies greater
depth.  It's a reading of impressively mature balance.

The second movement, a scherzo, riddled with allusions to the opera's
"Vanity Fair" sequence, requires great delicacy from the players, which
Hickox gets.  Yet no one walks on eggshells.  It's a positive control that
comes from, again, great power held in reserve, so that the broader moments
rise naturally from the more rhythmic passages.  I've heard performances
in which the conductor gooses the emotional level, and it almost never
convinces me.  The movement becomes too disjointed.  Hickox's reading is
of a piece.

In the slow third movement, Hickox triumphs.  I prefer him even to
Barbirolli here.  The composer uses ideas from the "House Beautiful"
sequence in the opera and also from Pilgrim's cry of "Save me, Lord!  My
burden is greater than I can bear." The opening is probably note-for-note
from the introduction to the "House Beautiful." One of the glories of the
movement is a remarkable "free-for-all" conversation among the winds, which
the players deliver with great beauty and grave reserve.  There's nothing
over-the-top here or calling attention to itself.  Everyone seems to be
"just singing." The movement expresses mainly serenity touched by sadness,
with the typical Vaughan Williams contrast of spiritual agitation.  The
climax of the movement (related to the alleluias of Vaughan Williams's
early hymn "Sine Nomine") not only rocks, but Hickox and the orchestra's
subsequent decrescendo is glorious.  Hickox also has mastered the end, with
an incredibly slow tempo that never, ever bogs down.  The orchestra
maintains intensity and the sense of forward movement to the final note.

The "Passacaglia" finale reworks ideas not only from the opera ("The
Arming of the Pilgrim"), but from Vaughan Williams's oratorio Dona nobis
pacem ("Nation shall not lift up sword against nation" and "Open to me
the gates of righteousness") and from his hymn setting of Bunyan's "He who
would valiant be." The movement poses mainly two challenges:  clarity of
the counterpoint and the return of the first movement's material.  Hickox
meets the first, but not entirely the second.  However, nobody else quite
gets it either.  I've studied the score for years, but I still have little
idea why the return of the opening horn call causes conductors to stumble.
On paper, it grows necessarily from the passacaglia variations.  Although
structurally an important point, it is fortunately short, and, once it
ends, conductors find their feet again.  However, Hickox does make clear
the relationship between the main theme of the passacaglia and the
first-movement material.  The symphony ends with an extended fantasia on
the passacaglia's ideas, and once Hickox reaches this point, equilibrium
is restored.  We end beautifully.

I can't recommend this CD highly enough.  Valiant-for-truth alone would
make it worth your while, but Hickox's account of the symphony ranks as
a milestone in the recording of Vaughan Williams's music.  The sound is
wonderful.

Steve Schwartz