Home listening - Vaughan Williams, Rebecca Clarke, Ravel and more

The Guardian 0

Fine new recordings from the RLPO and the Gryphon Trio. Plus, BBC Young Musicians past and present

• The tugging horns and low strings which open Vaughan Williams’s meditative, often wistful Symphony No 5 in D (1943) set a mood of harmonic ambiguity that never quite leaves this wartime work. Paired with the contrastingly bellicose No 6 in E minor (1948), it forms the third volume in the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra’s outstanding Vaughan Williams symphonic cycle, conducted by Andrew Manze (Onyx). The music of No 5 relates closely to the composer’s then unfinished opera The Pilgrim’s Progress, especially in the haunting Romanza (with excellent cor anglais solo). In this quietest of symphonies, even the last-movement Passacaglia, with its expansive brass episodes, is still essentially restrained.