Ralph Vaughn Williams

One composer that not only wrote great music, but whose Symphonies simply sound gorgeous on a great system, is RVW.  He also had a really interesting bio.  He was a nephew of Charles Darwin.  He asked Ravel if he could study with him after he had written his most famous work, The Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis.  He volunteered to be am ambulance driver in the killing fields of Flanders at 40 years of age.  He pioneered movie sound tracks, and it is the cinematic quality of most of his music that perhaps makes him especially appealing to Audiophiles   He was interested in English Folk and early Church Music as well as brass band music.  His symphonies are filled with these influences.

   RVW was considered passé when I began listening to music, hopelessly anachronistic compared to the likes of Schoenberg, Stockhausen, Boulez, or even Bartok, with whom he a great deal in common.  His time really came as the avant-garde began to lose its hegemony in Classical Music.  He had always been championed by the likes of Boult and Barbirolli, but it was the advocacy of Andre Previn and Leonard Slatkinin the seventies that made him wider known.  RVW cycles now seem to come with the regularity of Mahler or Bruckner.  Who sounds the best?

  The two cycles on the Chandon label are both demonstration level.  I give the nod to the earlier cycle led by Bryden Thomson.  The disc pairing the Fifth with The Lark Ascending will simply awe you with its soundstage-and that is my preferred disc when testing for that parameter.  The London Symphony with the Big Ben chimes still raises goosebumps.  The Third Symphony with the English Countryside depiction (unreal that he wrote it in the mud of Flanders, up to his neck in gore—he must of been yearning for home and peace) is so beautiful, with saturated colors in the winds.  The later Chandos cycle on SACD is also recommended.  The performances are a bit more dry eyed, but the DSD recording allows more low level detail. The soundstage isn’t as expansive but may be more realistic.  The low level detail is particularly important in the last movement of the Sixth, written immediately post WWII and thought to depict a post Nuclear landscape.

  Haitink cycle with the London Philharmonic from the eighties was the one that hooked me on RVW, particularly the depiction of the glacier and the penguins frolicking, and then the ultimate death in the snow drifts, of the Seventh, the Sinfonia Antarctica.  It still sounds great today.  I haven’t warmed to the latest cycle led by Andrew Manze, which seems to emotionally restrained.

  The Previn, Barbirolli, Boult and Slatkin cycles fro the earlier days of stereo are still recommended, but I prefer the more modern recordings to give RVW his due.

Even if Classical isn’t your genre, try his music.  Your system will thank you