Vaughan Williams: Symphony No. 5 • The Lark Ascending • Norfolk Rhapsody - Bernard Haitink, LPO, Sarah Chang

Symphony No. 5 by English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams was written between 1938 and 1943. In style it represents a shift away from the violent dissonance of the Fourth Symphony, and a return to the more romantic style of the earlier Pastoral Symphony. Many of the musical themes in the Fifth Symphony stem from Vaughan Williams' then-unfinished operatic work, The Pilgrim's Progress. This opera, or "morality" as Vaughan Williams preferred to call it, had been in gestation for decades, and the composer had temporarily abandoned it at the time the symphony was conceived. Despite its origins, the symphony is without programmatic context, and is in the form of an extended development of musical themes taken from the morality rather than an attempt to cast it directly into symphonic form.

The Lark Ascending is a popular piece for violin and orchestra, written in 1914 by the British composer Ralph Vaughan Williams. It was inspired by George Meredith's 122-line poem of the same name about the skylark. It was dedicated to Marie Hall who gave the first performance with piano accompaniment. Contrary to the popular imagination, Vaughan Williams actually wrote sketches for it whilst watching troop ships cross the English Channel at the outbreak of war. A small boy observed him making the sketches and, thinking he was jotting down a secret code, informed a police officer who subsequently arrested the composer! Thus, although the piece appears to be a pastoral idyll, at its heart it is a nostalgic work about England and the loss of innocence that the First World War brought.
The composition is intended to convey the lyrical and almost eternally English beauty of the scene in which a skylark rises into the heavens above some sunny down and attains such height that it becomes barely visible to those on the ground below. The First World War halted composition, but the work was revised in 1920 and it was premiered under conductor Adrian Boult on 14 June 1921, again with Marie Hall as soloist.

The small orchestral gem "Norfolk Rhapsody" No. 1 (1906, rev. 1914) has been included on this beautiful CD.

In an interview haitink once stated that "one should drink wine only in the country where it was made." Hence the choice for the LPO for these recordings.

Tracklist:
1. Vaughan Williams: Symphony No. 5 - 1. Preludio: Moderato
2. Vaughan Williams: Symphony No. 5 - 2. Scherzo: Presto
3. Vaughan Williams: Symphony No. 5 - 3. Romanza: Lento
4. Vaughan Williams: Symphony No. 5 - 4. Passacaglia: Moderato
5. Vaughan Williams: Norfolk Rhapsody No. 1
6. Vaughan Williams: The Lark Ascending




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