Catalogue # CHAN9902

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Richard Hickox and the London Symphony Orchestra proudly present\na world premiere recording.

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This is the world premiere recording of the original 1913\nversion and includes an extra twenty minutes of music never heard\nbefore.

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The original version has never been recorded although the\nrevised versions are regularly performed and recorded.

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Vaughan Williams dedicated A London Symphony to George\nButterworth, whose idyll, The Banks of Green willow which is also\nincluded on this disc, was performed alongside the premiere of the\nSymphony. The Idyll, The Banks of Green Willow, by George\nButterworth, was composed in 1913, the same year Vaughan Williams\ncompleted his A London Symphony. It is a sensuous work, which\nincorporates two folk songs Butterworth had collected in 1907.

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It was George Butterworth who first suggested to Vaughan\nWilliams that he should write an orchestral symphony and, after\nButterworth’s tragic death, Vaughan Williams dedicated A London\nSymphony to his memory. The work was finished by the end of 1913\nand first performed at the queen’s Hall in London on 27 March 1914\nconducted by Geoffrey Toye, and, as on this CD, was programmed\nafter The Banks of Green Willow. Following the loss of the full\nscore in Germany in 1914, Vaughan Williams, Butterworth, Toye and\nE.J. Dent reconstructed it from the orchestral parts, and the first\nperformance of the reconstruction took place on 11 February 1915\nunder Dan Godfrey. Vaughan Williams revised the symphony three\ntimes: in 1918, 1920 and 1933, and the well-known ‘Revised Edition’\nwas published in the mid-1930s.

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Listening to the original conception of A London Symphony is\nparticularly exiting in that there is around twenty minutes of\nextra music from a time when Vaughan Williams was writing works of\nfreshness and lyricism, including The Lark Ascending (1914).

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Many of Vaughan Williams’s friends regretted the cuts, Sir\nArnold Bax referred to his sadness at ‘the loss of a mysterious\npassage of strange and fascinating cacophony with which the first\nversion of the Scherzo closed’. Bernard Hermann felt that the\ndeleted bars in the slow movement removed some of ‘the most\noriginal poetic moments in the entire symphony’.

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After the first performance of the original version, as heard on\nthis CD, Vaughan Williams’s close friend Gustav Holst wrote to the\ncomposer saying ‘You have really done it this time!’ How right he\nwas.

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