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There was more to Vaughan Williams than The Lark Ascending<\/em>. The 20th-century composer was one of Britain\u2019s finest symphonists, with nine to his name, spanning fifty years of his creative life. There\u2019s something for everyone among these works.<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p><\/div> <\/section> In ninth position Symphony No. 9 in E minor. <\/strong>This sombre work is the most enigmatic of Vaughan Williams\u2019<\/a><\/strong>s symphonies, written in the final years of his life before his death in 1958, at the age of 85. Its hinterland is found in Thomas Hardy\u2019s tragic novel Tess of the D\u2019Urbervilles<\/em> and the landscape around Stonehenge, a place of ancient mystery; the composer later removed references to these programmatic inspirations, but it\u2019s hard not to attribute something of the music\u2019s serious mood to them. \u2018There was no denying the coolness of the critics\u2019 reception of the music\u2019, noted Vaughan Williams\u2019s biographer Michael Kennedy of the premiere. Ever since, love for the Ninth Symphony has been a slow burn.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Next is Sinfonia Antartica. <\/strong>Before the symphony, came the film. Scott of the Antarctic<\/em> (1948) traces the tragic expedition of Captain Robert Falcon Scott, who was pipped to the South Pole by the Norwegians, then froze to death just 11 miles from a food store that would have saved him and his men. Vaughan Williams\u2019s brilliant film score gave him more than enough extra material and enthusiasm to pen the Sinfonia Antartica <\/em><\/a><\/strong>(1952). Although the Grove Dictionary of Music writes off the piece as \u2018the least successful of the mature symphonies\u2019 because it\u2019s \u2018neither symphonic nor sufficiently programmatic\u2019, it\u2019s hard to resist its evocations of the terror and grandeur of the remote icy wilderness. That said, the atmospheric music is even better heard alongside the polar visuals.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n In seventh position is his first symphony.<\/strong> Of all Vaughan Williams\u2019s symphonies, it\u2019s A Sea Symphony<\/em><\/a><\/strong>, arguably, that sounds most of its time \u2013\u00a0which is both a strength and a weakness. Its maritime subject was popular with British composers at the turn of the twentieth century, and Vaughan Williams launches us onto a great musical voyage with a satisfying splash, as the chorus exhorts us to \u2018behold, the sea itself!\u2019. Parry described the piece as \u2018big stuff with impertinences\u2019, while Vaughan Williams later referred to it, affectionately one assumes, as \u2018that old thing\u2019. Completed in 1909, setting poetry by Walt Whitman, this choral symphony marks the start of an important musical voyage for the composer \u2013 even if there are longueurs.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Sixth is number 8.<\/strong> Compact, taut, and characterful, Vaughan Williams\u2019s Eighth Symphony<\/a><\/strong> hardly gets its fair share of the limelight. Vaughan Williams was in his eighties when he wrote this four-movement piece, which looks back at the music of his younger years with a shrewd yet affectionate eye. If the deft Scherzo<\/a><\/strong> and joyful finale earn the Eighth its reputation as the most light-hearted of his symphonies, the Cavatina adds a note of serious introspection. Nostalgic echoes of the lush Tallis Fantasia<\/em> <\/a><\/strong>and the soaring violin of The Lark Ascendi<\/em>ng<\/a><\/strong> are tempered by lean writing for strings alone, while elsewhere the use of a large percussion session \u2013\u00a0and tuned gongs inspired by Puccini\u2019<\/a><\/strong>s Turandot<\/em> \u2013 create an engagingly distinctive sound-world.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n His third symphony is in fifth place.<\/strong> The \u2018Pastoral\u2019 of this symphony<\/a> <\/strong>is not some glorious rural idyll \u2013\u00a0or, as the composer put it, \u2018not really lambkins frisking at all, as most people take for granted\u2019. Instead, the landscape is one that Vaughan Williams saw while working as an ambulance driver on the First World War<\/a><\/strong> battlefields in France. This piece is a musical reckoning with those difficult wartime experiences \u2013\u00a0and the result is music that\u2019s elusive, meditative, and ambiguous, a lone trumpeter and a wordless soprano voice adding to the elegiac quality.<\/p>\n Fourth is number 4. William Walton<\/a> <\/strong>thought this was the greatest symphony written since Beethoven<\/a><\/strong>. Yet Vaughan Williams\u2019s Fourth Symphony<\/a><\/strong> marked a radical departure from the worlds of his first three symphonies. This is music that explodes with rage, piling up angry dissonances and fortissimo outbursts. While the composer denied that its furious spirit was a reaction to increasing global tension and the rise of the Nazis, it\u2019s hard to separate art from life. His biographer felt it was \u2018a kind of self-portrait: the towering rages of which Vaughan Williams was capable, his robust humour, his poetic nature \u2013 all these are here.\u2019 According to his second wife Ursula, the trigger was a review of a modernist symphony in The Times<\/em>, whose use of cyclical repeating motifs Vaughan Williams felt compelled to recreate. \u2018I don\u2019t know if I like it, but it\u2019s what I meant,\u2019 he said about the finished score.<\/p>\n A London Symphony<\/em> is in third place. <\/strong>Just as Turner\u2019s landscapes and Dickens\u2019s novels immortalised London in paint and prose, so did Vaughan Williams capture the essence of the capital in music. The composer once said that \u2018Symphony by a Londoner\u2019 might be a better title, because the symphony stands alone and absolute \u2013\u00a0but for many listeners, the hints of London are part of the piece\u2019s appeal. The Westminster Chimes (aka Big Ben) ring out in the first movement, in an atmospheric evocation of the Thames. The Lento suggests the melancholic beauty of Bloomsbury Square on a November afternoon, according to Vaughan Williams, while the use of mouth organs and mechanical pianos adds \u2018local colour\u2019 in the Scherzo<\/em>. The finale of A London Symphony<\/em><\/a><\/strong> takes us into metaphorical and philosophical territory, inspired by a passage in an HG Wells novel tracing a journey out to sea: \u2018Light after light goes down. England and the Kingdom, Britain and the Empire, the old prides and the old devotions, glide abeam, astern, sink down upon the horizon, pass \u2013 pass.\u2019<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n In second place is Symphony No. 6. <\/strong>Vaughan Williams headed into new territory with each symphony. His Sixth Symphony<\/a><\/strong> is a strange, unsettling and bleak, written as if in the grip of an apocalyptic vision, each movement strikingly original. He wrote it from 1944-47, as the world tore itself apart, and the brutal atomic age was unleashed, but once again the composer sought to distance his music from real-world events and denied this was a war symphony. But how else to hear this music? An anguished cry opens the symphony, while a fateful three-note motif haunts the Moderato \u2013 an echo of the violent \u2018Mars\u2019 from Holst\u2019s The Planets<\/em>. After a turbulent Scherzo, including a trio which pays homage to jazz musicians killed by wartime bombing, Vaughan Williams ends with a chilling epilogue. Here, we are given a hint of meaning, when he linked it to lines from Shakespeare\u2019s The Tempest<\/em>: \u2018We are such stuff\/As dreams are made on, and our little life\/Is rounded with a sleep.\u2019<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\nWhich is the best Vaughan Williams Symphony?<\/h2>\n
9. Symphony No. 9 in E minor<\/strong><\/h3>\n
8. Sinfonia Antartica (Symphony No. 7)<\/strong><\/h3>\n
A Sea Symphony (Symphony No. 1)<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Symphony No. 8 in D minor<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Pastoral Symphony (Symphony No. 3)<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Symphony No. 4 in F minor<\/strong><\/h3>\n
A London Symphony (Symphony No. 2)<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Symphony No. 6 in E minor<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Symphony No. 5 in D major<\/strong><\/h3>\n