Vaughan Williams 3 - Pastoral Symphony

Rec.:Cond. Sir Mark Elder

    Well I guess at least one decent thing came out of WWI and that would be this symphony. The inspiration for this symphony came to Ralph Vaughan Williams while he was serving in France during the war. Which I would imagine contributes to the overall somber tone of this pastoral symphony.

    My first though while listening to the first movement is that nobody writes in this mysterious, lush style better than Vaughan Williams (RVW from here on out). There is just a certain magical quality to the music that is distinctly his. Although this can have the side effect of making much of his music indistinguishable from others in his works. A lot of his slow, rich, harmonically rich pieces are kind of interchangeable in my head. On the other hand, what lacks in memorable moments in the first movement is made up for how enjoyable the experience is while you are in it. It is the kind of music that you can just let wash over you.

    If the first movement is forests and fields then the second movement sounds marshy and foggy. The noteworthy aspect of this movement is the trumpet solo, which the player is instructed to play as a bugle (all on one fingering), and has the player go to out of tune partials. This was apparently inspired by a bugler he heard during the war who failed to play his octaves correctly. So you heard it here folks, keep playing your music loud and wrong in case you inspire a nearby better musician! The trumpet solo leads up to a brief explosion of light in the otherwise dark movement, which then settles back in to a distant horn solo.

    The third movement has the only extended aggressive music and the only real fast music in the symphony as well. Even at that the aggression and energy dwindles back down by the end of the movement. This movement is full of folk gestures and pentatonic scales (although they were present in the earlier movements, they were really obvious here). I also found it interesting that once the tone of the movement started to wind down around the halfway point that there were no more large climactic spots like I would have expected.

   Hark! A voice! The defining feature of the final movement is a wordless vocal soloist. Still in the pentatonic language, the themes of this movement are presented more clearly and often more simply than in the other movements. The voice for instance, is accompanied by strings on a unison note. While there is an optimistic climax, the music once again settles in to its somber tone, with the voice carrying the piece to the end.