Whatever the title may say, Vaughan Williams’ Pastoral Symphony, his third, was first and foremost his elegy for those who had died in the first world war. As Michael Kennedy’s sleeve note to Mark Elder’s beautifully paced recording points out, the pastoral world that the music evokes is not the cosy, folksy one of the Cotswolds, but the fields of northern France where the battles of the war had been so recently fought, and where Vaughan Williams himself had served as a stretcher bearer. The troubled, sullied world that the music explores is recreated by Elder and the Hallé without ever becoming overwrought or maudlin, and bringing out unexpected resonances along the way, even echoes of Nielsen in the dark and unnervingly restrained scherzo; Sarah Fox is the wordless soprano who frames the finale, perfectly distanced from the orchestra by the recording. The rest of this well-packed disc includes a spacious, perhaps slightly low-key account of the Tallis Fantasia, the Wasps Overture and the Five Variants on Dives and Lazarus, but it’s the glorious account of the symphony that makes it memorable.
