R3 Live in Concert 5/5/16 - RLPO/Manze in Vaughan Williams

[Richard Barrett]

Thanks to this thread I've just had a listen to no.4 which I haven't heard for ages. I think his teacher Ravel might have said that the instrumentation is too obvious (strings always together, woodwinds always together, brass always together...), and all those octave doublings are perhaps a lazy and unsubtle way to add weight to the lines, but the first two movements especially are impressive and original. Why anyone would wish to force it into some kind of programmatic mould still escapes me. RVW of course had no time for people hawking theories of what this or that piece was "about".

[ardcarp]

I think his teacher Ravel might have said that the instrumentation is too obvious (strings always together, woodwinds always together, brass always together...), and all those octave doublings are perhaps a lazy and unsubtle way to add weight to the lines

Ravel may have thought that, but I get a bit cross with people who criticise VW's orchestration. He knew exactly what sound he wanted, and he didn't want to sound like Ravel or even Holst. I personally don't rate Brahms' or Schumann's orchestration very highly...but they presumably knew what they wanted too.

[EdgeleyRob]

Some pretty amazing sounds are produced by this supposedly obvious and lazy orchestration.
I don't try to force the music to fit a programme,RVW's works always seem to suggest an underlying meaning to me.

[Richard Barrett]

Ravel may have thought that, but I get a bit cross with people who criticise VW's orchestration. He knew exactly what sound he wanted, and he didn't want to sound like Ravel or even Holst. I personally don't rate Brahms' or Schumann's orchestration very highly...but they presumably knew what they wanted too.

Neither do I. And this isn't a general problem I have with RVW. The orchestral sound of his 3rd and 5th symphonies, and to some extent the 6th (and I have to admit to knowing 1, 2 and 7-9 hardly at all), seems greatly more subtle, original and sophisticated than the 4th. I wasn't in any case suggesting that it "should" sound like Ravel, but using Ravel as an example of a composer (obviously known to RVW!) whose orchestration doesn't depend so much on doublings and primary colours.

[kea]

I could say that the third movement, in the hands of an understanding and thoughtful conductor, is a vision of heaven with the odd bit of hell knocking on the door! But V-W was agnostic, so was he thinking of - what? at the time of writing it; we will never know.

Probably "He hath given me rest by his sorrow and life by his death" and "Save me! Save me, Lord! My burden is greater than I can bear" for its two respective themes, seeing as they're derived from those lines in The Pilgrim's Progress.....

(No. 5 in general is to me a response to Sibelius's Sixth, one that proposes a very different resolution to the same musical/spiritual "problems". I've always considered the third movement a sort of elegy or threnody rather than a romance, and in no way find the last movement to be happy or triumphant [more like a gradual progression towards acceptance of death]. But I'm probably on shaky ground already seeing as I consider Sibelius's Sixth a piece of absolutely crushing bleakness and loneliness rather than the pleasant neoclassical divertimento everyone else hears. Most people I know seem to consider the Vaughan Williams Fifth to be pastoral cow-pat music, or to be deeply uplifting and spiritually consoling, depending on their attitude to 20th century music that has triads in it.)

As for the 4th... I can't say I have ever enjoyed it much as it just seemed loud and bombastic, apart from the slow movement, and gave an overall impression of monotonality that annoyed me for some reason (I mean it's not like any other VW symphony is different in that regard, just that they have different "sorts" of monotonality if that makes sense...). But part of that could probably be the orchestration, which struck me as a bit more film-ish than would be tasteful. >_>

[Richard Barrett]

Probably "He hath given me rest by his sorrow and life by his death" and "Save me! Save me, Lord! My burden is greater than I can bear" for its two respective themes, seeing as they're derived from those lines in The Pilgrim's Progress...

On the other hand he may not have been thinking of those texts when recontextualising his musical materials in the symphony... I find this comparison with Sibelius interesting enough to send me back this evening to the latter's 6th Symphony to see if I can hear what you mean (it's the only one of Sibelius' symphonies I can find any interest in, coincidentally, or not). Of the RVW symphonies that I know, each has a particular soundworld of its own, so that the "tone of voice" established through orchestration is really inseparable from the rest of what's normally called musical material - so the observations made so far about the orchestration of the 4th actually go "all the way down" so to speak: it's not just the way the orchestra is used that's filmic or bombastic but the whole stuff of the music. Although at the same time for me there's something half-hearted about it, as if the pull of good taste is too strong to allow it to let itself go and shed the tweed jacket...

[ahinton]

No. 5 in general is to me a response to Sibelius's Sixth, one that proposes a very different resolution to the same musical/spiritual "problems". I've always considered the third movement a sort of elegy or threnody rather than a romance, and in no way find the last movement to be happy or triumphant [more like a gradual progression towards acceptance of death]. But I'm probably on shaky ground already seeing as I consider Sibelius's Sixth a piece of absolutely crushing bleakness and loneliness rather than the pleasant neoclassical divertimento everyone else hears. Most people I know seem to consider the Vaughan Williams Fifth to be pastoral cow-pat music, or to be deeply uplifting and spiritually consoling, depending on their attitude to 20th century music that has triads in it.)

I cannot say that I find Sibelius' Sixth Symphpony to be as you do - indeed, such a description might seem to me to be more fitting for his Fourth Symphony (Sibelius' that is, not RVW's!). Likewise, I don't find that RVW's Fifth Symphony submits easily to cowpat-testing and anything that might be "deeply uplifting and spiritually consoling" about it seems to me to sit uneasily alongside the kind of quietly disturbing impression similarly conveyed in parts of the symphony to which the composer actually did give the subtitle Pastoral (and which is also a respectable distance from the kind of cowpat-besmirched green-and-pleasant five-barred-gated music as which it and other RVW works are sometimes portrayed); to begin with, I find it hard to shake off the remarkable - albeit entirely coincidental - resemblance betwee RVW5's opening gesture on a C pedal point and a passage from the coda to the finale of Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony (written only a few years earlier and which of course RVW could not have known), on the same C pedal point - OK, the resigned contemplation of the RVW's in marked contrast to the exhausted despondency of the Shostakovich, but their notes nevertheless create that resemblance despite their contexts being so different.