Toward the Unknown Region, Manchester’s celebration of the 150th anniversary of the birth of Ralph Vaughan Williams, shared between the BBC Philharmonic and Hallé orchestras, does not confine itself to the nine symphonies. So although the second concert in the series, conducted by Andrew Davis, included two of Vaughan Williams’s greatest orchestral achievements, only one of those was a symphony. That was the Fourth, which was played alongside the ballet score composed immediately before it, the “masque for dancing”, Job.
The brutal power unleashed by the BBC Philharmonic in the Fourth provided more than enough symphonic substance for one concert, however. Davis never attempted to soften any of its raw edges, or play down the grotesqueries, whether in the grinding dissonances of the opening, the violent changes of mood in the scherzo, with its clod-hopping trio, or the militaristic swagger of its finale. Nothing else in Vaughan Williams’s output is quite like it.
