Vaughan Williams: Symphony No. 6 • In The Fen Country • On Wenlock Edge - Bernard Haitink, LPO, Ian Bostridge

Ralph Vaughan Williams's Symphony in E minor, published as Symphony No. 6, was composed in 1946, during and immediately after World War II. Dedicated to Michael Mullinar, it was first performed by Sir Adrian Boult and the BBC Symphony Orchestra in April 1948. Within a year it had received some 100 performances. Vaughan Williams, very nervous about this symphony, threatened several times to tear up the draft. At the same time, his programme note for the first performance took a defiantly flippant tone. The composer never intended the symphony to be programmatic, but it was inevitable that his post-war audience should associate its disturbing and often violent character with the detonation of the atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He is widely quoted as having said, "It never seems to occur to people that a man might just want to write a piece of music" in response to these questions. In connection with the last movement, the composer did eventually suggest that a quotation from Act IV of Shakespeare's The Tempest comes close to the music’s meaning: "We are such stuff / As dreams are made on; and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep."

The Symphony is noteworthy for its unusually discordant harmonic language, reminiscent in approach if not in technique of his F Minor Symphony from over a decade earlier, and for its inclusion of a tenor saxophone among the woodwinds. In several respects this symphony marks the beginning of Vaughan Williams’s experiments with orchestration that so characterise his late music. The symphony is in four linked movements (i.e. the movements lead straight into one another with no pause between them), and includes a number of ideas that return in various guises throughout the symphony, for example the use of simultaneous chords a half-step apart, or the short-short-long rhythmic figure.

The CD is completed with recordings of "In the Fen Country" for orchestra (1904) and the suite "On Wenlock Edge" (originally for tenor, piano and string quartet) with Ian Bostridge as the soloist.

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.






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