I'll be back with more reviews! There are at least a dozen more commercial recordings that I'm aware of, plus a whole pile of YouTube videos of concert performances from orchestras all over the world!
This one also comes in at about 37 minutes, but here Norrington takes more liberties with the tempos within the movements, taking some passages slower and some faster. It's definitely worth listening to both recordings, they're both effective and convincing.
I also found a radio broadcast recording from a few years earlier, with Norrington conducting the San Francisco Symphony. The sound quality on this is very good.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=yySg...
If I have a gripe about this recording, it's that the sound engineering sounds a little muddy to me and e.g. in the Passacaglia it's hard to pick out the lines of the different instruments; the horn calls sound very muted, for instance.
Here's the link. This version is about 37 minutes, which makes it among the quickest of all modern recordings and approaching RVW's own two recorded versions.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=gklw...
Moving on, I was surprised to see that Roger Norrington had recorded RVW's 5th, since I was aware of him primarily for his "historically informed" performances of Beethoven and other early romantics. That seems to be the approach he's taken with Vaughan Williams and it is a GOOD thing. 👍
This version comes in at ~38 minutes so the tempos are "normal". Some reviewers have quibbles about the balance in the recording and you might find it a little lacking in emotion, but honestly, if this is the only recording you have or the one you choose for study purposes, it's totally fine.
Next up we have another Dutch conductor, Kees Bakels, with the Bournemouth Symphony. I've linked to a video with a score here for additional entertainment(?), but the CD was released on the budget Naxos label and is easy to find.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=suLi...
I will say that the orchestra does a fine job here and the recording is first rate, but it's definitely Haitink's interpretation of RVW than RVW himself you're getting in this version.
This is one of the slowest (if not *the* slowest) recordings ever made, and I thought I would hate it. Haitink somehow manages to make the first three movements work, though; it's only in the Passacaglia where it totally comes apart for me, sounding dirge-like rather than confident.
Going back to recordings from the 1990s, the next one after the 1992 Andrew Davis version was this one from Bernard Haitink, made in Dec 1994.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=niuT...
Also, having video as well as sound definitely enhances the experience. Besides seeing what instruments make which sounds, I was interested to see the expressions of both musicians and conductor. E.g. I noted the assistant concertmaster was in tears at the end.
Here Davis has brought in the timings on the earlier movements so the whole thing runs just under 38 minutes, not counting the breaks between movements. (Nobody hits the 35 minutes RVW suggested in the score!) This seems like a performance where the conductor is letting the music speak for itself.
As a follow-up to this, on YouTube there is a video from 2016 with Davis conducting a live concert performance with the Frankfurt Radio Symphony. It is sublime and I highly recommend it.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=LsQG...
One thing I noted about this recording is that the balance is such that the horn calls in the last movement are unusually prominent. Somewhere I read that RVW may have intended these to represent air-raid sirens, but in some recordings you can hardly hear them.
This recording suffers from the same flaw as many others: Davis's tempos are too slow, with the Romanza being almost 13 minutes long. 😴 The Passacaglia is the exception; it's not as perky as the composer intended, but it's a comparatively "normal" tempo and doesn't sound like a dirge, at least.
#ClassicalMusic More recordings of the Vaughan Williams Symphony No. 5!
Picking up where I left off with reviewing recordings from the 1990s, we have the Andrew Davis with the BBC Symphony from 1992.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5LY...
More to come in future installments of this thread.... there were a LOT of recordings of the 5th issued in the 1990s and after as it entered the standard orchestral repertoire. I've heard several of them, but some not for quite a while, so I'm giving everything a fresh listen as I go along.
Whither is fled the visionary gleam? Where is it now, the glory and the dream? The whole sense of confident triumph goes out the window with that choice. So I've gotta give a thumbs down to this version. 👎
The problem is that, after getting off to a properly energetic start to the movement and bouncing through the bouncy section, when he got to the section with the loud chord and woodwind solos, Marriner abruptly slowed the tempo to a crawl, and it stayed that way all the way to the end. 😒
Next up, we have Neville Marriner's version from 1990.
I was thinking this was another really fine recording of the work up until midway through the Passacaglia (sigh).
www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AW6...
Anyway, as I said, Menuhin's version is beautifully recorded and I have no quibbles with the orchestra's playing either. You might enjoy the conductor's liberties with the tempos more than I do, so it might be worth a listen.
...again Menuhin slows way down with the reintroduction of the first-movement music, and the coda at the end is at a crawling pace. The Passacaglia is supposed to be like a confident assurance that everything will be OK, that good will triumph over evil; and IMO Menuhin misses the mark on that.
The first movement starts off well enough, sounding very similar to Thomson's, but Menuhin has elected to play the recapitulation in slow motion, it seems. The scherzo and Romanza are more "normal" sounding, and the Passacaglia starts off briskly and continues with plenty of "bounce". But...
From everything I have read, Thomson was an extremely humble conductor, always trying to put the music and the composer's intent first instead of leaving his personal stamp on the performance. Menuhin's version, by contrast, definitely seems to be *his* personal interpretation.
Next up is Yehudi Menuhin's 1987 recording, made shortly after the Bryden Thomson version that has long been my favorite. Like the Thomson recording, this one has a "glowing" sound quality that enhances the music.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtzV...
Anyway, I listened to this recording so you won't have to. The 1980 version on YouTube is more worth your time but it's not going to be anybody's go-to recording either because of the (lack of) technical quality, and all the coughing.
On top of that, here Rozhdestvensky takes a much slower pace overall, and on top of that he's taking liberties with the tempo like slowing down even more in some passages and then taking the climaxes at a furious pace. I think that detracts from the work rather than enhances it.
First off, the orchestra isn't up to it. To my ear, they sound kind of "amateurish" throughout, with intonation/tuning problems and an unmistakable whopper of a wrong note at the climax in the finale. 😳
In 1988, Rozhdesvensky made another live recording of the 5th with the "USSR Ministry of Culture Symphony Orchestra", as part of a complete set of the RVW symphonies. Sadly, this isn't nearly up to the quality of his 1980 version.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2FT...