• The rich pathway that runs through English music from William Byrd and Thomas Tomkins to Purcell and on to Ralph Vaughan Williams is traced in two new releases to mark the start of a new decade.
Martyn Brabbins conducts the BBC Symphony Orchestra in Vaughan Williams’s Symphony No 3, ‘Pastoral’ and Symphony No 4 (Hyperion), two works that could hardly differ more, the quiet and contemplative Pastoral contrasting completely with the ferocious Fourth. The composer’s widow, Ursula, once commented that the Pastoral (1922) inhabits a Monet-like landscape, and Brabbins takes that cue, perfectly capturing the mystical, impressionist nature inherent in the linear counterpoint of the music, which rarely rouses itself above mezzo forte.
The symphony recreates memories of rural beauty not just in England but also in France, where RVW had served at the front as an ambulance driver. Half-remembered, haunting bugle calls are beautifully handled here, as is the long, worldless soprano solo that closes the last movement, a meditation on all that has gone before, lovingly realised by Elizabeth Watts.
The Fourth Symphony (1934) was completed not long after Hitler became chancellor of Germany, and while RVW denied it was written as a reaction to world events, the music bristles with alarm and disquiet. There is some great playing in the urgent, doomy opening of the first movement and in the strenuous polyphony of the frenetic finale, coolly directed by Brabbins in this much recommended landmark recording.
• Thomas Tomkins (1572–1656), a pupil of Byrd and a Gentleman of the Chapel Royal, wrote copious amounts of music, some of it recorded for the first time by today’s Chapel Royal Choir at Hampton Court Palace for a new album entitled O Give Thanks Unto the Lord (Resonus). Verse anthems and service settings include Death Is Swallowed Up in Victory and Tomkins’s Seventh Service, both ingeniously reconstructed from several sources by Peter James. This collection offers a vivid survey of the musical tastes of the court of Charles I, sung with refreshing fervour.
• BBC Sounds is the place to catch up with last Wednesday’s Radio 3 in Concert, featuring Mariss Jansons’s shattering reading of Brahms’s Fourth Symphony with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, recorded just weeks before Jansons’s death last November – a profound memorial to an immense talent.
