Ralph Vaughan Williams
           London Symphony

* Butterworth: The Banks of Green Willow
* Vaughan Williams: Symphony #2 "London" (orig. 1913 version)

London Symphony Orchestra/Richard Hickox
Chandos CHAN 9902 Total time: 67:39

Summary for the Busy Executive: One of the most important releases of
British music in the past five years.

Vaughan Williams composed his first purely orchestral symphony (he had
already written the choral "Sea Symphony") in 1913 at the instigation
of the younger composer George Butterworth.  He then spent about twenty
years tinkering with it, publishing the final revision in the mid-Thirties.
Vaughan Williams revised eagerly and ruthlessly.  He wanted to put the
best of himself out there and therefore wanted to know his faults.  He
was adamant about his revisions.  The final form superseded any earlier
version.  Generally speaking, he knew what he wanted as well as when he
hadn't gotten it.  I consider him a brilliant editor of his own stuff.
I got an inkling of exactly how brilliant when EMI released the 1949
recording of Boult conducting the Symphony No. 6 with the original
version of the scherzo (EMI CDH 7 63308 2).  There's nothing wrong with the
original scherzo, if that's all you know, but the revision lifts the entire
symphony to a new level of achievement.  What seemed interesting is now
downright exciting.

However, the revisions to the "London" Symphony are far more extensive.
This CD restores roughly twenty minutes of music that hasn't been heard in
probably sixty years.  Because it's Vaughan Williams, it's good music, to
boot.  Not everyone liked the revisions.  These included musicians of the
caliber of Bernard Herrmann and R.  O.  Morris.  One critic who had heard
both versions wrote that one of the attractions of the original version was
that "like the city itself," it wasn't too rigidly planned.

The original certainly impresses me that way.  One feels as if one walks
through the city and comes across something new as one turns the corner.
However, there's also a greater melancholy, a spiritual lassitude, about
the work.  Vaughan Williams's revisions focus the symphonic argument,
give the symphony a greater sense of forward motion and purpose.  They
concentrate the musical ideas.  They remove weak ones - thoughts that were
too easy and unworthy of the movements as a whole (I think especially of
the second trio in the original scherzo).  For me, the composer left out
nothing essential.  Nevertheless, I find myself longing for the original
version of the "Epilogue," that musical evocation of the Thames at night
winding to the sea, inspired by Wells's Tono-Bungay:

   Light after light goes down. England and the Kingdom,
   Britain and the Empire, the old prides and the old
   devotions, glide abeam, astern, sink down upon the
   horizon, pass - pass. The river passes - London passes,
   England passes ...

The revision of the epilogue runs several pages shorter than the original,
full of beautiful music, which extends and strengthens (as opposed to
dilutes) the final version.  As I say, it's the only passage I miss.  Young
composers and Vaughan Williams headbangers like me should listen to both
versions of the symphony.  This look into the workshop fascinates and shows
that, far from the bumbling amateur he was painted, Vaughan Williams knew
exactly what his music was about.

Butterworth's Banks of Green Willow typifies his output.  People said of
Butterworth that no man was worse at making a friend or better at keeping
one.  He was blunt and even angry.  I met an old priest in New Orleans who
actually knew him at university and who told me that on the occasion of
their first encounter, Butterworth hardly said a word and scowled at him
the whole time.  Butterworth fell under the influence of Vaughan Williams
and the folk-song movement.  He was killed, shot through the head, during
World War I.  In his brief life, he wrote songs and short orchestral
pieces, of which The Banks of Green Willow counts as my favorite.  Almost
every one of his works shows a tender, lyrical nature and a great degree
of artistic assurance.  The opening to The Banks manages to say a lot in a
very few notes.  You wonder how his music might have developed had he lived
and whether he would have done something other than exquisite miniatures.

Hickox does a beautiful job with the Butterworth and a very good one with
the Vaughan Williams.  I still prefer Barbirolli (EMD Classics Imports
65109) and Boult (EMI 64018) for the London Symphony as warmer and more
penetrating.  However, Hickox and his orchestra achieve a luminosity of
texture and in the "Epilogue," at least, match the insight of the older
recordings.  The sound is excellent.

Steve Schwartz