Hearing the
BBC Symphony Orchestra
perform
Vaughan Williams
is something like hearing the
Vienna Philharmonic
play
Bruckner
: there is what might be called institutional knowledge, where the players have the music in their bones. That shows in this fine
release by the orchestra under conductor
Martyn Brabbins
, part of a cycle of the composer's symphonies (interrupted by the COVID pandemic but now thankfully resumed). It is not that
Brabbins
proposes a radically new way of looking at
, although his program, with an intermezzo of three folk song settings and the war anthem
England, My England
, is clever; it affirms the links of even
' darkest symphony, the
Symphony No. 6 in E minor
, with the folk music strand in his musical personality. His readings are straightforward, and that works;
is not a composer whose essence is hidden. What
does well is to execute the orchestration just about as well as it could be done. Sample the finale of the
Symphony No. 6
, which should give the lie to the idea that
was unaware of modernist musical aesthetics (it is titled "Epilogue," but it is the heart of the work). At the pianissimo dynamic level for its entire length, it represents an orchestral black belt for English music, and it is magnificently executed here.
lavishes considerable lyricism on the Cavatina slow movement of the much livelier
Symphony No. 8 in D minor
; it is a lovely reading. This is, simply,
the way it's supposed to be, with excellent engineering from Hyperion at the Watford Colosseum. ~ James Manheim