Thursday, April 21, 2022
Bridgewater Hall, Manchester
As part of the BBC Philharmonic and the Hallé’s joint venture to perform Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Nine Symphonies, with conductors including Andrew Davis and Mark Elder, and all on BBC Radio 3, either live or recorded, this current concert (the fourth) had more than a touch of d’éjà-vu about it, for, as during Proms 2017, John Wilson coupled VW’s Ninth with Gustav Holst’s Planets, https://www.classicalsource.com/prom/prom-14-ralph-vaughan-williamss-ninth-symphony-gustav-holsts-the-planets-bbc-scottish-symphony-orchestra-conducted-by-john-wilson/; and, as also then, he was on the quick side in the Symphony’s first movement – coming across as impatient – the music lacking its accustomed vision (the work inspired by the Wessex of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles) if not emotional urgency: but it sounded hard-pressed, incidents passing by too fleetingly (like a film played-back at the wrong speed), its outer recesses barely reached. The second movement, including a flugelhorn, fared better – shape and tribal rhythms apparent – with the following Scherzo (sporting saxophones in triplicate and intertwining) nicely gawky, yet the Finale, essentially moderate and serenely travelling if not without angst-ridden climaxes, could have done with greater time on its side – Wilson just kept going … aspects thrown away … and the diminishing final measures – with cymbal clashes restored (they’re in the manuscript but were not published, although Leonard Slatkin on his RCA recording restored them) – were short-changed. Although timings are only an indicator, Wilson’s half-hour didn’t tell the whole story, other conductors (as recorded) invariably add a few minutes, and reveal more, and then there was Maurice Handford (1928-86) who reached forty at a Liverpool Phil concert (also on Radio 3), a performance to reckon with, and more of a masterpiece.
Opening The Planets was a suitably thrusting and war-like ‘Mars’; ‘Venus’, broadly paced (ironically), needed more rehearsal, the violins sometimes uncertain; ‘Mercury’ was a lightly articulated arrow in flight; and ‘Jupiter’ started rotundly and then spurted, the ensuing hymn-tune dignified, if not troubling the hairs on the back of one’s neck. It was Grim Reaper time next as ‘Old Age’ arrived courtesy of an inexorable ‘Saturn’; then the ‘Magician’ that is ‘Uranus’ lacked impetus (and also, as broadcast, the organ glissando); and, finally, ‘Neptune’ was ethereal, chilly, with even greater distance achieved by the ladies of the Hallé Choir, the fade to nothingness well-managed.
Vaughan Williams’s Ninth Symphony may be considered the final enigma of the series. For the first performance, under Sargent (a very odd RPS programme) Vaughan Williams provided programme notes (as he had done for seven of his previous eight symphonies). The original tempo indication for the first movement, in those notes, and which Sargent adopted, was Allegro moderato, not Moderato maestoso – which the published score has. Clearly, RVW’s first thought was that his music was Allegro, not Moderato – a telling difference which almost all conductors in my experience tend to overlook – assuming ‘moderate’ equates to an old man’s slow physicality, not the speed of his thought.
Vaughan Williams died during the night before the first recording was made with Boult, so he never heard the work with the changed tempo indication or the additional concentrated listening a recording session brings to a composer, and did not therefore study the work with the altered first movement tempo indication, whenever that was made. It may be that he felt Sargent took the first movement a shade too fast (as was Sargent’s wont in many works), but VW was at the final rehearsal that Friday afternoon prior to the first performance and appeared satisfied.
The first movement of the Ninth was initially suggested by the opening chorus of Bach’s St Matthew Passion – to which the initial theme, harmonic movement of the Symphony, and its tempo can be clearly related. The Ninth symphony is a visionary work – no question about that, which the often irrelevant commentaries on the unusual orchestral make-up and would-be ‘programme’ about Thomas Hardy pale into insignificance when confronted by a work I regard as a transcendental masterpiece.
I believe John Wilson’s tempos and interpretation of this work to be possibly the most penetrating I have heard; I know they are the result of deep study of this unique masterpiece. I would refer readers to William Mann’s superb analysis of this Symphony in The Times in January 1960; it should be reprinted in this of all years.
Genuinely interesting Bob, but tempo-marking disparities aside – and bearing in mind that one man’s Allegro is another’s Allegretto or another’s Presto, and I don’t doubt John W’s intensive study – but the speeds for the outer movements last night were too fast, the music less of a masterpiece, and the last time I felt this was when JW conducted the work during Proms 2017, as above, David Gutman writing the review I would have done at the time. Colin
I think we would agree that tempos are relative, dependant upon factors other than those constrained by metronome markings. I regard this work as truly visionary – but from the off in 1958 it was treated as some kind of old man’s walk down memory lane: ‘heard it all before’ was the general assumption – but this Symphony, to my ears (and to those of others, more technically adept than mine) is a kind of musically-expressive equivalent of Shaw’s ‘Heartbreak House’: a summation of ‘life thus far’ yet equally, and more importantly, possessing a powerful sense of inner, forward-looking, strength. This has nothing to do with familiar syntax or sentence construction – as Schoenberg said ‘A Chinese philosopher speaks Chinese – the point is, what is he saying?’ – or a flag-waving major key sense of dubious triumphalism. The Ninth takes up the question posed at the end of the Eighth Symphony, where we all expect a D major smiling triumph until it suddenly questions our hoped-for imaginative positivity with the very final phrase in D minor, implying ‘there is more to come’ – what came, of course, was the Ninth Symphony, a further forward-looking masterwork. VW was certainly not ‘finished’ at this time: when he died, he was working on a new opera (largely completed) and a long-worked-on Cello Concerto – alongside other pieces. We can only imagine what his Tenth Symphony would have been like. By the way, the premiere of the Ninth was on a Wednesday, not Friday – my bad.
Bob, to avoid any doubt, I too think VW9 is a masterpiece, and I thought so from the off – back in the days of LPs, Boult’s second recording on EMI. I also heard Boult late in his life conduct the LPO in the work (RFH, a concert shared with Rattle) and have probably heard all the available recordings, including Boult’s first (Everest). I look forward to Brabbins’s on Hyperion, but I really don’t think John W gives VW9 the space it needs; that’s twice now.
Very glad to read Bob Matthew Walker’s amazingly knowledgeable comments. I shall listen to the VW 9th today. I know that John thought very highly indeed of the symphony.
Ouch! I put my comment on before I realised that Bob and Colin were horns-locked on this issue. Goes to show one should not file a comment at 7.28am….
I didn’t feel horns were locked, Monica. Bob knows his stuff, and maybe I do, but it comes down not to tempo indications but what in any performance sounds right, and JW’s speeds in the outer movements do not convince. More on VW9 soon. Col