‘That evening Ralph didn’t want any dinner, but by bed time he was hungry and sat on his bed eating bananas and biscuits and making plans for going to Walthamstow for the recording of his Ninth Symphony next day. It was all very ordinary, usual and like many other nights had been and we did not guess that before dawn death, not sleep, would claim him.’ This is how Ursula Vaughan Williams movingly concludes her biography RVW. When August 26, 1958 did eventually dawn she rang Sir Adrian Boult to tell him that the composer now wouldn’t be joining him and the LPO to make the first recording of what would sadly be the final Vaughan Williams symphony. In her later autobiography Paradise Remembered she revealed how in those hours between death and dawn, as she sat in silence with her husband, she finally opened the bedroom windows of their home in Hanover Terrace, overlooking Regent’s Park, and let his spirit fly out on the early-morning air to the accompaniment of the Pastoral Symphony – of which Boult had given the premiere in 1922 and made the first and only recording then available, in 1952. It is a poignantly private valedictory envoi, but somehow entirely appropriate and liberating.

The Ninth Symphony had been started early in 1956, even before the premiere of the Eighth in May of that year. Obviously anxious to get on with its successor, Vaughan Williams spent most of the next two years writing it, mostly in London but some in Majorca (shades of Chopin) and some in Ashmansworth, the home of Gerald Finzi (who died in September 1956) and his widow Joy; by November 1957 it was ready to be tried out privately as a piano run-through before what was described as ‘the Committee’ – a group of trusted friends and colleagues that included, on this occasion, Arthur Bliss and Herbert Howells. The first performance was to be given on April 2, 1958, under the auspices of the Royal Philharmonic Society (to whom it was dedicated) at the still-new Royal Festival Hall by the RPO with Malcolm Sargent, and broadcast live on the BBC Third Programme. With characteristic foresight, RVW himself paid for an extra rehearsal, on March 21, which enabled him to make some tiny adjustments and one significant little cut. The public reception was enthusiastic, most critics were unenthusiastic (‘a re-hash of things he had done better before’) and the composer remained sanguine: ‘I don’t think they can quite forgive me for still being able to do it at my age.’ Similarly, when Sargent gave it again at the Proms on August 5 (also broadcast live) with the BBC SO – the last concert VW attended – the audience cheered the nearly 86-year-old composer to the rafters while the newspapers remained sniffy. So, as Ursula wrote, ‘he was looking forward to Adrian’s recording at the end of the month when they would work over it, section by section: this almost anatomical discussion was something from which he always felt he learned a great deal’.

Into the studio

Between 1952 and 1956 the LPO and Adrian Boult had recorded all the symphonies to date for Decca at Kingsway Hall with the composer present; this first projected cycle was begun to mark VW’s 80th birthday. These still-definitive recordings show very clearly how conductor and composer were in complete accord, and Boult visited him on August 7 to work through the score in preparation for taking the LPO to Walthamstow Town Hall and an encounter with the new but short-lived American recording company Everest. This may have been because of a recent change in the LPO’s contract with Decca, and Boult would soon go on to record symphonies by Mahler, Hindemith and Shostakovich for Everest, together with his third version of VW’s Job (1930), which was dedicated to him. The company was proud of its pioneering taping techniques and the experiment certainly worked wonders for the Ninth, which still sounds superb in its later transfers to compact disc – the most recent as part of the repackaged complete Decca cycle.

Boult’s recording was prefaced by a brief speech in which he laments the death of their ‘beloved friend Ralph Vaughan Williams … seven hours before we began our work’ and something of this spirit of shock and affection imbues the remarkable recording made in his unexpected absence. Its clarity of texture and purpose is immediately apparent as, against a pedal unison E held from top to bottom of the orchestra, inner wind and brass outline a striving line (rooted in the minor) which the composer said he derived from playing an organ bass line at the start of Bach’s St Matthew Passion – a work VW conducted almost every year of his life from 1923 until 1958, either with the Bach Choir in London or at the Leith Hill Festival. A natural sense of summation but also of profound exploration is thus evident from the very start and the ensuing exposition evolves entirely from this potent germ, even though different themes also appear to emerge as part of the discourse – most notably a lyrical ‘second subject’ initially in free canon on three clarinets and later as a violin solo. This ‘sonata form’ underpinning informs every bar and Boult is masterly in his organic command of the unfolding structure. In the second movement he balances very effectively the jerky oscillations between another slow tune seemingly derived from the Bach germ, and a faster ‘barbaric march’ idea – vividly dramatic contrasts that immediately suggest some sort of extramusical dimension. Was there, possibly, some programme behind this music?

This is what Vaughan Williams had to say in 1958: ‘It is quite true that this movement started off with a programme, but it got lost on the journey – so now, oh no, we never mention it – and the music must be left to speak for itself, whatever that may mean.’ Very few were therefore aware that it was a journey with Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) which got lost as work on the symphony progressed. But later research into manuscripts and sketches has revealed some of the direct connections between the novel and the symphony: the first movement once bore the heading ‘Wessex Prelude’; parts of the second movement have Salisbury, Stonehenge and Tess attached to them and the finale was headed ‘Landscape’; the legendary ‘Ghostly Drummer of Salisbury Plain’ also makes his presence felt in both second and third movements. That all of these disappeared before performance and publication is perhaps indicative of RVW’s experience in including specific quotations in the score of the Sinfonia antartica in 1952‑53, and of his oft-expressed annoyance when asked to ‘explain’ what his music ‘meant’: ‘Why can’t a man just write a piece of music?’ he once exploded with exasperation in response to one question too many in relation to the Sixth Symphony in 1948. He knew full well that his music did speak very eloquently for itself.

One aspect of the Ninth Symphony that made an immediate impression was the inclusion of some novel and unusual sounds within its orchestration. A telegram came in the middle of the night from former pupil and then Professor of Music at Cambridge, Patrick Hadley, who had heard the live broadcast of the premiere: ‘Came over marvellously – the saxes and flugel contributed a strange unearthly magic to that wonderful score, fondest love, Paddy.’ The sound of a single saxophone was already familiar from the score of Job (an alto) and the Sixth Symphony (a tenor) but they emerge from the initial texture in the Ninth’s 10th bar as an inimitable trio, creating an unforgettable resonance that recurs at critical moments throughout the score and especially in the brilliantly biting Scherzo third movement, which is virtually a miniature triple concerto for saxophones. The flugelhorn is a different matter. Ursula and RVW took a holiday to Austria in the spring of 1957, when work was well under way, and during a boat ride on the Königsee their pilot ‘unpacked a flugelhorn and played a halting phrase, which the mountain echo sent back, beautifully improved – “A good sound,” Ralph said. “I shall put it into the symphony”.’ It sings along quite unobtrusively in the first movement until near the end, when it joins the solo violin and its companions in haunting counterpoint: another unforgettable moment. Thus prepared for the limelight, it opens the second movement alone with that Bach derivative; but it is, in fact, also an adaptation of a theme ‘borrowed from an early work of the composer’s, luckily long since scrapped, but changed so that its own father would hardly recognise it’. This work was The Solent, an ‘impression for orchestra’ from 1902‑03 intended as part of a cycle to be called In the New Forest: the Wessex theme was there from the start but it now has a plaintive, solitary air as if heard from a distance on Salisbury Plain.

It is now time to return, briefly, to that first performance under Malcolm Sargent in April 1958. Over the intervening decades an urban myth developed to the effect that the premiere was something of a disaster and that this had hung over the work to its general detriment. In 1987 Michael Kennedy (who was at the first rehearsal) wrote that it ‘had had an unsatisfactory first performance under Sargent’ and this view stuck. Many years later, at least one person who was present on April 2 told me, in no uncertain terms, that the premiere itself was in fact very good and that the legend was unfair. And then finally, in 2022 (to mark VW’s 150th anniversary), a recording taken from the BBC broadcast emerged on the Somm label in a refurbishment by Lani Spahr, which settles the matter once and for all. The playing of the RPO is very good indeed, and the work and its sound world come across powerfully despite the hiss and crackle – tellingly, a similar broadcast of the equally historic and controversial premiere, two months earlier, of Tippett’s Second Symphony from the same venue (now on Pristine Classical) seems to emanate from the modern era in comparison! But what Sargent does is to stick, somewhat rigidly (admittedly), to VW’s metronome marks with the result that it is a vivid, driven and very clear performance – and it is good to have been able to set the record straight, albeit nearly 65 years after the event.

Some, however, were never quite reconciled to Sargent’s mostly brisk speeds – and most notable among these was Roy Douglas, the composer’s amanuensis, who knew the score better than anybody. He remained sceptical about VW’s metronome marks, even asserting that they were probably wrong because he never even actually had a metronome! Whether instinctively, or following his consultation on August 7, Boult modified many tempos in his first recording and had even dared to suggest the need for a bit more music towards the end because it seemed to him too abrupt: ‘To my astonishment he said he would think it over, but meanwhile I might like to take it a good deal slower at the end (than the record of Sargent’s first performance). So I did.’ This letter to Michael Kennedy was written six months after Boult’s second recording of the Ninth in December 1969 as part of another complete cycle, now for EMI, and back in Kingsway Hall. Everything Boult does here is very similar to his 1958 take but perhaps without the added frisson of its peculiar and unique circumstances. Even so, his ending is, again, extraordinary: the extra grandeur he lends the final peroration leads inexorably – and yet with a spine-chilling sense of wonder – to the three final blasts of a miraculous E major, with the saxophone trio returning to resolve their cadence at the very end. Are these ‘The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces, / The solemn temples, the great globe itself’ finally dissolving to ‘Leave not a wrack behind’ as the strings fade into nothing? A cold-blooded analysis ‘for those who are curious about these matters’ can show very easily how these last pages are an exact transformation and resolution of their opening counterparts, heard over half an hour earlier, and simultaneously a drawing together and clarification of all the symphony’s thematic threads, but the visionary wisdom of a lifetime’s endeavour sweeps such things up in these glowing waves of receding sound. As Ursula said to herself after the second performance, in the Royal Albert Hall: ‘I thought, well, that is the end of Ralph’s life and I can see a turning point. It is leading out into another place. It is extraordinary.’

The legacy of the Ninth

In the aftermath of Vaughan Williams’s death, performances of the Ninth Symphony were momentarily numerous, especially abroad, although the Canadian premiere (the first outside the UK) had already taken place in Vancouver on August 10, 1958, conducted by William Steinberg. On September 25 Leopold Stokowski, a VW friend and supporter of old, was due to give a concert at New York’s Carnegie Hall to celebrate his 50th anniversary as a conductor. It was originally to have concluded with Shostakovich’s recent Symphony No 11, but in responding to his friend’s death (he had visited VW in 1957 and performed the Eighth Symphony) he substituted the Ninth and a recording of the concert preserves this moving occasion. If Sargent was generally fast and Boult middling in speeds, Stokowski veers towards the slow. He finds a brooding sense of melancholy in much of the music and a quality – perfectly natural in the circumstances – of valediction. In December, John Barbirolli conducted a performance in Philadelphia (no recording survives, sadly) and more bizarrely a performance in Lisbon under Pedro de Freitas Branco (also from December 1958) did appear briefly on the Portugalson label but was reportedly rather rough and ready. The Ninth appeared at the Proms again in 1959 and 1960 (Sargent each time) but then disappeared to all intents and purposes from public view and lived on only in Boult’s first recording.

The neglect often suffered by great composers after death certainly afflicted Vaughan Williams just as it had Elgar, Delius and Holst. The often frivolous 1960s and ’70s were generally out of joint with VW’s comprehensively humanitarian vision and the avant-garde tendency looked at him askance. But a new EMI contract for Boult kept the flame alive and his second cycle (around which another urban myth has developed that sees it, incorrectly, as slow and sleepy) was topped by magnificent recordings of The Pilgrim’s Progress, Toward the Unknown Region and Dona nobis pacem. At exactly the same time the arrival of André Previn at the LSO heralded a further revival of interest and another complete symphony cycle for RCA was recorded between 1967 and 1972, with the Ninth taped in 1971. This is very well played but the recording now sounds its age, far more so than Everest’s stunning sound for Boult in 1958. The performance veers on the slow side in the outer movements – Previn is much closer to Stokowski in spirit than to Boult, let alone Sargent – but this Ninth doesn’t bulge as self-indulgently as his Fifth. In its first incarnation on LP and cassette the symphony was coupled with a suite drawn from music written in 1955 for the film The England of Elizabeth and in the central movement we encounter the Solent theme, shortly to appear in the symphony. It would also feature as the theme on which VW based his Variations for Brass Band in 1957 – but it actually first surfaced publicly in A Sea Symphony (sung to the words ‘And on its limitless heaving breast, the ships’), which was premiered in 1910. And as of this year a reconstruction by Martin Yates of a projected (but rejected) second slow movement for this ambitious work shows that it also featured in the setting of Whitman’s ‘Aboard at a Ship’s Helm’, which VW was going to call ‘The Steersman’. In the Ninth Symphony, therefore, a lifelong obsession finally reaches its apotheosis.

Cycles on CD

After these two cycles of the early 1970s the Ninth mostly goes into abeyance again until a sudden reawakening led to the recording of six complete sets between 1987 and 2000: Bryden Thomson with the LSO for Chandos; Leonard Slatkin and the Philharmonia on RCA; Vernon Handley in Liverpool for EMI; Andrew Davis and his BBC SO on Warner; a Naxos cycle in Bournemouth shared between Kees Bakels and Paul Daniel; and Bernard Haitink with the LPO on EMI. Having observed the division of earlier performances and recordings of Symphony No 9 into the basically fast, middling and slow categories, it now becomes even clearer that these are obvious demarcations between interpretations. Of these sets, those by Handley and Davis have generally been the best received: Davis is firmly in the middling camp, as is Handley, though he occasionally puts on a surge. Slatkin takes a slow and expansive approach – but, rather fatally, he sees this through a filmic lens. So, where the Sinfonia antartica brilliantly turned a film score into a symphony, Slatkin somehow tries to turn a symphony into a film, rather catastrophically. In the Scherzo, where most conductors concur about speeds, he demonstrates that being a notch too fast turns menace and bite into something more resembling ‘The Teddy Bears’ Picnic’. A report of the session, however, is interesting in revealing that those involved realised that VW’s pre-premiere excision between figs 14 and 16 in the finale (at the point where the movement’s two halves meet) had simply been papered over in the parts. Rather mischievously, they were about to reveal the hidden notes and to record them as an appendix, when an eagle-eyed and ever-alert Mrs Vaughan Williams caught their drift and put an immediate stop to their intention – charmingly but with a firm hand!

Both Bakels and Thomson take on Sargent’s shade in sticking to the metronome marks and this bargain Naxos account – at 29'45" – is the shortest on record. The BSO play very well in Poole and the sound is fine but much of this just sounds hurried and perfunctory. How differently things move, at similar speeds, in St Jude’s, Hampstead. The performance by the underrated Bryden Thomson is breathtaking in its drive and sweep, and carries all before it in richly atmospheric sound: a genuine discovery that makes me want to explore the rest of this overlooked set. Bernard Haitink followed naturally in Boult’s footsteps at the LPO and – like another Dutch predecessor in the role, Eduard van Beinum – developed a great affinity with the greatest English composers: Elgar and Vaughan Williams in the concert hall, Britten and Tippett mainly in the opera house. His VW cycle is opulently recorded, wonderfully played and full of fascinating insights. No 9 falls into the slowish mode and is impressively controlled but oddly lacking in atmosphere.

A set that bookends this period in a peculiar way is a series of concerts given by the Anglophile Russian maestro Gennady Rozhdestvensky at the Philharmonia Building in Leningrad (as it was) with the USSR Ministry of Culture Symphony Orchestra. The collection was issued here by Melodiya in 2014 and brought a refreshing new perspective to music which had by now been through a thorough process of rediscovery and rehabilitation both at home and abroad. Rozhdestvensky’s British credentials had been deepened by his tenure at the BBC SO between 1978 and 1981, and these late-Soviet performances glow with atmosphere and understanding. The Ninth is cast in the slowish mould of Stokowski, Previn, Slatkin and Haitink and is arguably the most penetrating of these, if you can endure the bronchial accompaniment of an infection-afflicted audience.

The Ninth in the new century

We come now to a final clutch of performances which affirm that the Ninth Symphony is in better health than ever before in the hands of conductors who show a remarkable depth of understanding. When he died so tragically aged just 60 in 2008, the late Richard Hickox was just two symphonies away from completing a very special cycle for Chandos with the LSO. As the first conductor to present the full series in London concerts, he was cruelly denied the chance to record the Sinfonia antartica and the Ninth. The label wisely chose Andrew Davis (also much missed as of April this year) to step into the breach for the last two symphonies with the Bergen Philharmonic in the Grieg Hall. Recording No 9 in 2016, it won’t seem unexpected to find the template of his performance not dissimilar to that of the 1995 BBC SO account. But there is a world of difference here, too: from the very opening a special shiver of atmosphere colours the playing and the same characterisation enriches every stage of the symphony. No other conductor – even Boult – captures such a heart-melting string sonority in Tess’s music within the slow movement. Davis finds an inevitable sense of tracing a fateful journey through this score and the apocalyptic vision at the end arrives with awesome wonder: this is an astonishing testament to a lifetime’s devotion.

It is almost matched, but not surpassed, by three versions that concluded their respective cycles in 2018, 2021 and 2022. Mark Elder and Martyn Brabbins give very similar, middling-tempo accounts, both superlatively played and recorded with little to choose between them. Andrew Manze, however, explores startling new territory in giving us the slowest version of all at 41'43". It has a completely different feel to the ‘fast’ Thomson and ‘middling’ Davis and at times we could almost be listening to a different work! But it has an inexorable logic that is often eye-blinking in its ability to open different windows on to a once-familiar landscape. In the week before his last, RVW went for a brief stay in Wessex: Joy Finzi drove them to see a floodlit cathedral which was one of Uncle Ralph’s very favourite. Ursula’s account is a summation, somehow, of his life, work and the conclusion of this great final symphony, so she must have the last word: ‘When we got to Salisbury we saw the cathedral transformed to gold, and details that one had not noticed standing out, so that the design of the whole was even more noble than in daylight. A dazzled owl flapped in and out of the lights gilding the spire and, as the evening got darker, both the blue night sky and the golden building intensified in brilliance.’

The Top Choice

Bergen PO / Andrew Davis

Chandos 

This is a bonus in a way, with Andrew Davis stepping in to complete a cycle started by Richard Hickox. But he brings unique vision and meaning to this music, and in Bergen he surpasses his earlier BBC SO account as also a moving Prom from 2008. From the very opening dark statement he guides us infallibly through an evocative yet organic symphonic journey, which he caps with a truly awesome and masterly conclusion to a life’s work.

The Historic Choice

LPO / Adrian Boult

Decca 

Recorded on the day the composer died, this first commercial recording has a special sense of immediacy and clarity in an interpretation for which Boult consulted him a fortnight earlier. Its authentic authority and devoted attention to detail are both palpable, with sound quality that is still remarkable today.

The Fast Choice

LSO / Bryden Thomson

Chandos 

The sheer drive and energy of this performance carry all before them. Although Thomson enjoyed being a bit of a ‘Jack the lad’ with orchestras, his essential seriousness of purpose shines through in the LSO’s committed playing as captured in characteristically sumptuous yet clear recorded sound.

The Slow Choice

RLPO / Andrew Manze

Onyx 

Controversial though they may seem, the imposing speeds Manze adopts for the outer movements here bring a remarkable sense of insight and inner colour to this music and often cast an intriguing new light on familiar territory. He carries the orchestra with him throughout and is glowingly recorded.

Selected discography

Recording Date / Artists / Record company (review date)

1958 RPO / Malcolm Sargent Somm ARIADNE5016

1958 LPO / Adrian Boult Decca 473 241-2DC5 (2/60, 2/03); Eloquence ELQ484 2204 (12/22)

1958 Leopold Stokowski SO / Leopold Stokowski Cala CACD0539 (3/05); SIGCD2069

1969 LPO / Adrian Boult Warner Classics 087484-2 (9/70)

1971 LSO / André Previn RCA Red Seal 88875 12695-2 (6/71, 3/91, 6/16)

1988/89 St SO of the USSR Ministry of Culture / Gennady Rozhdestvensky Melodiya MELCD100 2170 (8/14)

1990 LSO / Bryden Thomson Chandos CHAN8941 (7/91); CHAN9087/91

1991 Philh Orch / Leonard Slatkin RCA Red Seal 88697 90249-2 (8/93)

1993 RLPO / Vernon Handley Warner Classics for Pleasure 575312-2 (1/95)

1995 BBC SO / Andrew Davis Warner Classics 2564 61730-2 (7/97, A/04)

1996 Bournemouth SO / Kees Bakels Naxos 8 550738 (3/99); 8 506017

2000 LPO / Bernard Haitink Warner Classics 984759-2 (11/04)

2016 Bergen PO / Andrew Davis Chandos CHSA5180 (3/17); CHSA5303 (10/22)

2018 RLPO / Andrew Manze Onyx ONYX4190 (7/19)

2021 Hallé Orch / Mark Elder Hallé CDHLD7558; CDHLD7557 (7/22)

2022 BBC SO / Martyn Brabbins Hyperion CDA68405 (4/23)