Customer Rating: 
Summary: Two Extrordinay Symphonies
Comment: The Third and Fifth symphonies of Vaughan Williams are among his most peaceful and serene of his works. I once heard a commentator on public radio say that he listened to the Fifth symphony before boarding a plane. If the unthinkable happened and the plane when down, he contended that he would be better prepared to accept his death have reached so serene a state. The Fifth was written when Vaughan Williams was in his early 70�s, and the mood of reflection and peace associated with the music made may think the composer had entered a state of restful reflection. They did not dream that he would write four more symphonies that would prove Vaughan Williams had more fire in him than suspected.
The Third symphony (Pastoral) also has a similar feeling of reflection. It is odd that it was written in France during the First World War while Vaughan Williams was in the ambulance corps. I think of it as hearkening back to a time before the war when the French countryside, now blasted by shells, was a peaceful place.
These recordings are among the best conducted by Sir Adrian Boult, and although they date from the early 1950s they have been so beautifully remastered that it will not matter they are not digital recordings. The subtle orchestral shadings in both symphonies are magical and have rarely been caught so precisely. A must for those interested in Vaughan Williams�s music.
Customer Rating: Summary: TRANSCENDENTAL VAUGHAN WILLIAMS
Comment: I remember my first encounter with Vaughan Williams; it was, of course, his Symphony No. 2 ("London")--- and doesn't it always seem to be THIS particular symphony, especially when you're young, like I was, and open to music you may never have heard. Naturally, I thought it was grand, and it is. As is his Symphony No. 7 ("Sinfonia Antartica"), which I discovered soon afterwards and also felt thrilled by. As a novice, I fell easily under the accessibility of these works--- and the spells they cast. I would never give up this period of some thirty years ago, or the hunger that drove me to search out more and more music, or the growth that it incurred.
However, time and age intervene, as they are apt to do, and our vision widens, our experience broadens, life, with its diverse pleasure and pain, enables us or forces us to open ourselves even further. Thus I came to
Volkswagen's Symphonies No.'s 3 and 5, not because I had never heard them or owned them. To the contrary, I collected three complete sets of the
Volkswagen Symphonies, in my LP days, the Boult included; but I never REALLY heard them. And these two symphonies in particular never really "touched" me... barely even listened to them... until now, years and years later.
Now they float over my soul like the dusk of a late autumn afternoon--- when my heart is filled with the wonder and puzzlement of seasons, years, decades gone by--- and the spirit, too, admits that the evening shadows are indeed growing longer and suddenly the sense of things past becomes an intense, yearning nostalgia. [I wish that in my twenties I had had, emotionally, what I do now in my early fifties--- and the wisdom to go hand-in-hand with it! But those regrets are better left for another time.]
With the ageless Sir Adrian at the podium, Vaughan Williams' Symphonies 3 and 5 are as beautiful, and bountiful, a coupling as one could wish for--- and in peerless performances like these, they bring tears to the eyes.
From the haunting opening bars of the "Pastoral," so reminiscent of "The Lark Ascending," we are enveloped by such a languid melancholy, lulled pervasively into such a womb-like and secure "place," that the temptation to stay "in the moment" is more than simply an overpowering desire: it is a need that arises from the innermost part of us. Boult's flowing sense of orchestral color, nuance and detail, his hushed and ethereal handling of
Volkswagen's mournfully heartfelt passages, his complete and utter sympathy with composition and composer--- all --- make this "Pastoral" something that beggars description.
And the Fifth Symphony? This is, absolutely,
Volkswagen's greatest achievement and, at that point in his life, the synthesis of everything he was--- and the promise of everything he would, as we know, become. What an ebb and flow exist in this work! What glorious swells of lyricism and emotion wash over us; what an all-surrounding atmosphere encompasses! Like a spiritual "sister" to the "Pastoral," listening to the Fifth Symphony is like drinking from the wellspring of life--- and becoming as one renewed, reborn --- a powerfil simile for one of the symphonic milestones of the twentieth century.
EMI has joined together
Volkswagen's most wonderous of symphonies and, under the baton of Sir Adrian (with grand sound from both the New Philharmonia and London Philharmonic), has secured a definitive place in the
Volkswagen catalogue for both on this most magnificent of CDs.
[Running time: 71:28]
