Gramophone Orchestral Award 2024: Vaughan Williams's Job: A Masque for Dancing

Wednesday, October 2, 2024

The symphonic potential of Job is revealed, as are some RVW rarities

Andrew Manze follows up his Vaughan Williams symphony cycle – the most distinctive of recent ones – with Job: A Masque for Dancing, whose symphonic potential has rarely been more evident than it is here.

His reading begins impassively but builds gradually and intently towards a ‘Saraband of the Sons of God’ of unaffected eloquence. Such high points as the lurid imagery of ‘Job’s Dream’ or the apocalyptic ‘A Vision of Satan’ lack for nothing in their visceral impact, but these are underpinned by a formal continuity and an expressive impetus unerringly sustained through to a climactic ‘Pavane of the Heavenly Host’ (preceded by a poised contribution from the orchestra’s leader Thelma Handy) then a raptly inward ‘Epilogue’. Choice in recordings of this work is now considerable (and likely to become even more so), but Manze comes demonstrably near the top of any shortlist.

Its couplings are wholly apposite. The ballet Old King Cole might be relatively lightweight, but its series of dances and scenic vignettes is always characteristic, and the RLPO clearly relishes being put through its paces (as Andrew Achenbach points out in his original review, absence of the optional chorus is a regrettable but not serious omission). This and the medley of traditional dance tunes that is The Running Set could easily find greater popularity with a little promotion (how about it, Classic FM?), and these recordings do them full justice.

Both sound and annotations are on a par with earlier issues in this Onyx project, which with any luck will extend to Vaughan Williams’s tone poems and his concertos before it concludes. Richard Whitehouse