The rediscovery of Vaughan Williams’s symphonies seems to be going from strength to strength these days – and with Andrew Manze’s recent cycle with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra and now Brabbins’s cycle on Hyperion, one feels spoilt for choice. What is more, with the array of new interpretations becoming available, one senses more and more the towering stature of this extraordinary music and of Vaughan Williams’s eminence as one of the 20th century’s greatest symphonists.

One immediately feels Brabbins’s special affinity for this music in the numinous pacing of the first movement of the Pastoral Symphony, which, inch by inch, moves towards its climax in the development. Besides the steady tempo, one is coaxed along by the gradual accumulation of weight as the brooding counterpoint of the composer’s themes moves ominously on. The slow movement has a real sense of elegiac rumination and the solo trumpet cadenza, played at a distance, is unsettling as much as it is haunting. Anyone who has witnessed the landscape of Flanders will find this vivid Stimmungsbild disquieting. Brabbins and the Hyperion recording team bring a thrilling clarity to the heavier timbres of the Scherzo and the diaphanous, mercurial (even Holst-like) coda with its almost neoclassical fugal music and exhilarating scoring. But it is in the finale, with its unforgettable, benevolent wind chorale (and in this recording the invigorating climactic countermelody in horns and cellos in the recapitulation), and the anxious transformation of the solo soprano’s wordless monody in the development that one feels the true pathos of this extraordinary work.

Brabbins’s reading of the first movement of the Fourth Symphony has much of the familiar violence and ferocity that we know from this work, and one is unavoidably gripped by the B A C H motif and the superimposition of fourths which adds so much to the language of this imposing canvas; but I was most moved by the space, shape and tone Brabbins gives to the lyrical second subject that then contrasts so vividly with the mechanistic theme (so redolent of Job) which follows. Brabbins’s attention to dynamic detail is also striking, both in the first movement (note the really hushed level of the development before the recapitulation really erupts) and the troubling demeanour of the slow movement. Again the demonic Scherzo has a clarity typified by the splendidly crisp bassoon- and string-playing from the BBC SO, and the sense of ensemble, engendered by the composer’s fascination for counterpoint and fugue, is hugely energising, not least in the powerful transition that links the Scherzo to the last movement, the bracing ‘oompah’ of the last movement’s opening march and the overwhelming density of the closing pages marked appropriately epilogo fugato.

Saraband ‘Helen’ (1913 14), which Brabbins has realised from the surviving draft vocal score, comes as a gentle, sonorous respite and a taste of that pre-war Vaughan Williams captured so powerfully in the Five Mystical Songs and A London Symphony. It is a heart-warming gem.