The Hallé announces the latest release in their series of works by Vaughan Williams, with two landmark pieces which are pinnacles of the composer’s output.

What moved me most was the sense of craggy dignity conveyed by both symphonies. The playing - as usual with Elder’s Hallé – is outstanding, technically and expressively.
Stephen Johnson, BBC Music Magazine, December 2017
Vaughan Williams Symphonies No.4 and 6 (CD HLL 7547)

Release follows hugely successful previous Vaughan Williams volumes including:

'A Sea Symphony' (CD HLL 7542)
Gramophone Editor’s Choice (Oct 2015)

Symphonies No.5 and 8 (CD HLL 7533)
Sunday Times Album of the Week and Music Web Recording of the Month (April 2013); Gramophone ‘Editor’s Choice’ (May 2013)

'A London Symphony'/Oboe Concerto (CD HLL7529)
BBC Radio 3 CD Review Disc of the Week (31 December 2011)

Symphony No.4 and 6 (CD HLL 7547)
Released in October 2017

Composed between 1901 and 1904, the Songs of Travel, settings of Robert Louis Stevenson for voice and piano (some orchestrated by the composer and some by composer and arranger Roy Douglas), proved a significant landmark in the emergence of Vaughan Willams’s personal voice. The work reflects the composer’s interest in folk song and is characterized by highly evocative orchestrations, ardent melodic lines, wide ranging expressions of emotion from joy to melancholy and highly effective word setting.

Winner of the Lieder Prize at the 1991 Cardiff Singer of the World Competition, Neal Davies has sung with the world’s leading orchestras, conductors and opera companies and received much critical praise for performances in concert, on stage and in recordings.

Ralph Vaughan Williams’s ‘masque for dancing’, Job, is one of his supreme achievements and was considered by Gustav Holst to be a masterpiece. Scored for large orchestra, the work was written between 1927 and 1930 and shows the composer’s imagination at its most vivid. Inspired by William Blake’s dramatic engravings, interpreting a Biblical narrative which examines human suffering in relation to a deity of justice, Vaughan Williams deploys traditional folk dances as a means of creating an idiomatic English dance style.

RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS

Job 'A Masque for Dancing' *
Songs of Travel ^

Featuring

David Adams, Violin *
Darius Battiwalla, Organ *
Neal Davies, Bass-Baritone ^

Conductor
Sir Mark Elder

Catalogue number CD HLL 7556