Vaughan Williams

Ralph Vaughan Williams
Sinfonia antartica (Symphony No. 7) 42’

INTERVAL: 20 minutes

A London Symphony (Symphony No. 2) 44’

Sarah Fox soprano
Ladies of the Manchester Chamber Choir
BBC Philharmonic
John Wilson conductor

Tonight’s concert is being recorded for broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on Tuesday 12 April at 7.30pm. It will be available to stream or download for 30 days after broadcast via BBC Sounds, where you can also find podcasts and music mixes.

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1 Prelude: Andante maestoso
2 Scherzo: Moderato
3 Landscape: Lento –
4 Intermezzo: Andante sostenuto
5 Epilogue: Alla marcia, moderato (non troppo allegro)

Sarah Fox soprano
Ladies of Manchester Chamber Choir

Four of Vaughan Williams’s nine symphonies have titles: A Sea Symphony (No. 1), A London Symphony (No. 2), Pastoral Symphony (No. 3) and Sinfonia antartica (No. 7). There’s much more to these, though, than mere mood-painting: they are also voyages of discovery. In A Sea Symphony’s finale, ‘The Explorers’, the great choral shout of ‘steer for the deep waters only’ sounds out like an artistic and spiritual manifesto.

In the case of the Sinfonia antartica a real journey inspired much of the music, only in this case ‘steering for the deep waters’ had tragic consequences. In 1947 Vaughan Williams was invited to write the music for the Ealing film Scott of the Antarctic. He soon found that the story of Robert Falcon Scott’s doomed expedition to find the South Pole in 1910–12 was giving him ‘very definite ideas’. The challenge to evoke an unimaginably strange landscape inspired Vaughan Williams to enlarge his orchestral palette as never before: piano, celesta, organ, harps, a large percussion section including gong, bells, vibraphone and wind machine, and wordless women’s chorus with solo soprano. These sounds are combined to create unforgettable sonic images: xylophone tremolos, brittle piano chords and muted brass create glittering ice formations; shuddering strings register stabs of cold as the voices wail like Antarctic sirens; soft flute dissonances against deep rumbling harp, piano and percussion suggest the powerful slow currents of a vast frozen sea. 

But there’s also the human dimension – the tiny figures of the explorers, awe-struck, tormented and oppressed by extreme cold, and finally obliterated by vast and merciless nature – and this emerges far more in the Sinfonia antartica than in the film score. Scott famously insisted in his final diary entry that he did not ‘regret this journey’. Vaughan Williams’s music hints movingly how such a statement might be possible, as for instance in the Intermezzo fourth movement, where we can sense something of the hopelessly touching dignity of Captain Oates’s self-sacrifice. 

Nowhere is this dignity more evident than in the wonderful long tune, noble yet full of foreboding, that begins and very nearly ends the symphony. The sounds of the void soon begin to assert themselves, but the first movement ends with hope reaffirmed – a quiet but majestic trumpet fanfare and a noble long crescendo. 

The weird and wonderful fauna of the Antarctic are evoked vividly in the Scherzo, but the central Landscape strips the music of even animal presence, conveying the lifeless grandeur of the interior with unsettling power, not least at the massive climax with its fortississimo gong stroke and crashing full organ chords. 

The Intermezzo follows without a break, emphasising the gulf between its depiction of fragile human warmth and the implacable inhumanity of Landscape. 

The Epilogue rouses itself resolutely, but the sounds of the void return, leading to a recapitulation of the symphony’s noble opening theme – but nobility means very little in an environment like this. Ultimately, voices and wind machine wipe the snow clean of human tracks.

^{Programme note © Stephen Johnson
Stephen Johnson is the author of books on Bruckner, Wagner, Mahler and Shostakovich, and a regular contributor to BBC Music Magazine. For 14 years he was a presenter of BBC Radio 3’s Discovering Music. He now works both as a freelance writer and as a composer.}

Ralph Vaughan Williams

Unlike Elgar before him, Vaughan Williams received a traditional musical education at the Royal College of Music in London, but he also studied abroad – in Berlin with Bruch and in Paris with Ravel. Soon after his return came the Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis (1910) and A Sea Symphony (1903–9). He was active as a collector of folk music and edited The English Hymnal (1906). After completing his second symphony, A London Symphony (1911–13), he joined the army. As well as choral works such as Sancta civitas (1923–5) and Serenade to Music (1938), he wrote a Mass and made many choral arrangements of English folk songs. Apart from The Lark Ascending (1914)for violin and orchestra, his concerto-type works – for viola (Flos campi), piano, oboe and tuba – remain rarely performed. After the death of his first wife he remarried aged 80, and he produced two more symphonies before his death.

^{Profile by Edward Bhesania © BBC
Edward Bhesania is Editorial Manager, BBC Proms Publications, and reviews for The Stage and The Strad. He has written for The Observer, Country Life, The Tablet and International Piano.}

INTERVAL: 20 minutes

1 Lento – Allegro risoluto
2 Lento
3 Scherzo (Nocturne): Allegro vivace
4 Andante con moto – Maestoso alla marcia (quasi lento) – Allegro Epilogue: Andante sostenuto

It was Vaughan Williams’s friend and fellow-composer George Butterworth who urged him to compose his first purely orchestral symphony. At first Vaughan Williams was doubtful, but then he looked again at sketches he’d made for a symphonic poem about London and began to see how they could be developed into a highly unusual four-movement symphony. He worked on it relatively quickly, and by 1913 the first version was finished. 

Given Vaughan Williams’s lifelong doubts about Mahler, it’s striking how Mahlerian his conception is here. For Mahler the symphony had to ‘embrace everything’, and in his London Symphony Vaughan Williams presents a remarkably vibrant collage of sounds and impressions – street vendors’ cries, tavern music, the kaleidoscopic bustle of busy streets and, framing it all, the eternal ebb and flow of the city’s great river. At the same time, it’s a triumph of symphonic engineering, or rather it is in the familiar revised version of 1933, which Vaughan Williams regarded as definitive. What we’re listening to here isn’t simply an illustrative tone-poem; there’s a current, like that of the River Thames itself, which not only carries us through, but juxtaposes the sound images in a way that challenges us (as in Mahler) to seek out deeper meanings.

As to what those meanings might be, Vaughan Williams provided only slender hints, but he did offer one significant comparison between the symphony’s ending and that of H. G. Wells’s novel Tono-Bungay: ‘The river passes – London passes, England passes …’ What Vaughan Williams doesn’t tell us is that the novel’s hero is sailing away in a destroyer, and that his last look back at the Imperial capital is (like that of the socialist Wells) a somewhat jaundiced one. What Wells in his novel calls ‘the last great movement in the London Symphony’ contains a grim depiction of a hunger march. The increasingly tragic march in Vaughan Williams’s finale is surely his response to that. Vaughan Williams’s London is life itself, in all its glory, but also in its pain and sadness, which makes it all the more fitting that this was the work he dedicated to George Butterworth’s memory when he was killed at the Somme in 1916.

A slow, possibly foggy dawn over the Thames, through which the muffled chimes of Big Ben can be heard, is suggested by the symphony’s opening music; then the city bursts into life, harshly at first, but with growing tenderness towards the heart of the movement, culminating in a shout of joy. 

Vaughan Williams described the moody second movement as ‘Bloomsbury Square on a November afternoon’; in this ‘pastoral of grey skies’ the sound of a lavender-seller’s cry can be heard on viola. 

The Westminster Embankment at night ‘with its crowded streets and flaring lights’ is the scene for the nocturnal Scherzo; at one point strings and muted horns do a very creditable impersonation of a mouth organ. 

Then the finale begins its tragic procession; the climax is unmistakably anguished, but then comes stillness, Big Ben chimes again, and night descends as the river’s current carries the listener steadily away.

^{Programme note © Stephen Johnson.}

Biographies

John Wilson conductor

Born in Gateshead, John Wilson studied composition and conducting at the Royal College of Music in London. He is in demand across the globe, regularly guest- conducting the world’s finest orchestras. In recent seasons these have included the London, Oslo and Royal Stockholm Philharmonic orchestras, Bavarian Radio, London and Sydney Symphony orchestras, Budapest Festival Orchestra and Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. He has also conducted productions at English National Opera and the Glyndebourne Festival. 

For many years John Wilson appeared widely across the UK and abroad with the John Wilson Orchestra and in 2018 he relaunched the Sinfonia of London, with which he has recorded several award-winning CDs covering a range of repertoire. In 2021 he and the Sinfonia of London made their debut performance at the BBC Proms, followed by two performances at Snape Maltings.

John Wilson has a large and varied discography. His most recent recordings with the Sinfonia of London include Respighi’s ‘Roman Trilogy’ and a disc of early works by Henri Dutilleux.

In 2011 he was made a Fellow of the Royal College of Music. In 2019 he was awarded the prestigious ISM Distinguished Musician Award for his services to music and in 2021 he was appointed Henry Wood Chair of Conducting at the Royal Academy of Music.

Sarah Fox soprano

Sarah Fox was educated at Giggleswick School, the University of London and the Royal College of Music. A former winner of the Kathleen Ferrier and John Christie awards, she is also an Honorary Fellow of Royal Holloway, University of London.

Roles with the Royal Opera, Covent Garden, include Micaëla (Carmen), Asteria (Tamerlano), Zerlina (Don Giovanni) and Woglinde (The Ring). Other highlights include Susanna (The Marriage of Figaro) for Glyndebourne Festival Opera and the Royal Danish Opera, and Mimì (La bohème) for Opera North. 

Sarah Fox’s concert career encompasses engagements across the USA and Asia, as well as tours throughout the UK and Europe. She works with many of the world’s leading orchestras, including the Berlin and Oslo Philharmonic orchestras, Colorado and Melbourne Symphony orchestras, Hallé and Salzburg Camerata.

She has appeared at the BBC Proms, Edinburgh Festival, Three Choirs Festival and Wigmore Hall, and is a regular guest with the Classical Opera Company. She performs frequently with John Wilson and his Orchestra, was a regular guest on BBC Radio 2’s Friday Night Is Music Night, and has performed in concerts with Rufus Wainwright in Europe and Hong Kong.

Sarah Fox has a varied discography that includes songs by Poulenc, Mahler’s Symphony No. 4, Mozart’s Requiem and The Cole Porter Songbook.