Plans to mark the 150th anniversary of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s birth have been years in the making, but no one could have imagined how prescient last weekend’s Manchester launch event would turn out to be. On a night when Russian tanks were encroaching further into Ukraine, two of the composer’s finest symphonies – both conceived in time of war, both firmly rejecting military bombast – sent a message of hope and a vision of peace out into the anxious air.
Undoubtedly sensing the bleak headlines, the BBC Philharmonic, sharing a new season of RVW’s nine symphonies with the Hallé, played his fifth with a particularly lush intensity, echoing the words of Adrian Boult, who heard its premiere in 1943 and wrote: “Its serene loveliness is completely satisfying in these times and shows, as only music can, what we must work for when this madness is over.”
