Vaughan Williams - Symphony 6 [Davis-BBC Symphony Orchestra]
Vaughan Williams sixth Symphony is full of intrigue, after the peaceful and glorious fifth Symphony, here we have a work of brashness, disharmony, even bleakness, much has been made of what it all means, what's the inspiration behind it all?, of course one of the clues is it's composition date of 1946-7, just after the war, and especially with the first atomic bombs dropped, war and annihilation, but as Vaughan Williams suggests, the music should be taken at face value, and listened as 'pure music' without any programme in mind.
I haven't heard this Symphony extensively, so this time i was very impressed with it, i still feel it should be even more brash and grotesque than it already is, it's something that Shostakovich would have been proud of, well i suppose i was moved the most by the second movement Moderato, it's an incessant tuneless rat-a-tat, that gets louder and annoying, one thing i notice is the drum rolls to announce certain passages [1:47 & 2:21], or maybe to unannounce! [2:50], quiet and ghostly strings appear [2:57], and it's like the Tallis Fantasia gone wrong, but the incessant call now comes from the brass like a fanfare [5:08], but now wont stop, ebbs and flows, but grows more agitated like Holst's Mars, it ends with an oboe solo [7:57] pleading and entreating, much like the oboe representing the duck in Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf, where you can still hear the duck in the Wolf's belly, strange and otherworldly, but still incredibly satisfying.
Here's a clip of Andrew Davis conducting the Tallis Fantasia on YouTube, also on this disc.
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