Vaughan Williams: Symphony No. 4 / Mass in G Minor / Six Choral Songs - Richard Hickox Singers / London Symphony Chorus / London Symphony Orchestra / Richard Hickox

Ralph Vaughan Williams (Composer), Richard Hickox (Conductor), London Symphony Orchestra (Orchestra), London Symphony Chorus (Performer), Richard Hickox Singers (Performer) | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Performer: London Symphony Chorus, Richard Hickox Singers
• Orchestra: London Symphony Orchestra
• Conductor: Richard Hickox
• Composer: Ralph Vaughan Williams
• Audio CD (May 21, 2002)
• SPARS Code: DDD
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: Chandos
• ASIN: B0000640BK
• In-Print Editions: MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #50,986 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Superb! Definitive., August 12, 2003

By 

P. SIMPSON "nucaleena" (North Yorkshire, United Kingdom) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Vaughan Williams: Symphony No. 4 / Mass in G Minor / Six Choral Songs - Richard Hickox Singers / London Symphony Chorus / London Symphony Orchestra / Richard Hickox (Audio CD)

AT LAST!! A near-definitive RVW 4th, in wonderful sound.

First, the performance. It's wonderful, to my ears the best since RVW's own some 70 years ago, but in rather better sound (!!). It's driven, tense, urgent, magnetic, mesmerizing, angry, powerful, searing, gut wrenching (literally) and disturbing. For the first time since you could first apprehend its power in RVW's and Mitropoulis recordings, this fourth comes across as being as motorific as Prokofiev, as visionary as Nielsen and as angry as Shostakovich, but adding the two qualities RVW's great teacher, Parry enjoined him to display, the temperament of an englishman and a democrat. The result is that the fourth finally takes its rightful place as a great 20th century symphony rather than a "fine" `or an "interesting" one. This is what RVW meant!!

I have owned the Mitropoulis, Previn and Handley recordings and heard the RVW, Boult and Thomson. I found Mitropoulis energetic and compelling, Handley a little light-on, to be honest (certainly compared to his marvellous 3rd and 5th), the Boult and Previn fine but ultimately unconvincing and the Thomson close to the best but a little rough. But this, ---- this is complete!!

The LSO plays brilliantly for Hickox, who gets more out of them in this piece than other fine conductors. Despite my words about energy, the LSO and Hickox also bring a subtlety to this recording which enhances the stature of both symphony and performance. Hear the "chill and eeriness" (to quote the Penguin guide yearbook) in the second movement and you'll get a taste for the range of their achievement here. And everywhere, even in the midst of the anger and passion, are the great tunes VW couldn't help but write, all played sublimely.

No wonder the Penguin guide awards this a Rosette.

As to the sound, I loved it. This 24 bit, PCM, 96 khz recording sounds wonderful. It captures the proper relationship of the instruments to each other and to the themes they're given.

One of my bugbears with all-DSD recordings has been that although dynamic range is wide, what we tend to get given is a differentiation between loud and soft, with even soft passages and soft playing still crystal clear and sometimes even "spotlit". That's fine when the theme or the instrument playing it is meant to be dominant (as opposed to just heard as part of the fabric) but, for me, can distort musical balances, presenting a crystal clear but fairly monochromatic picture.

What I like about this (and Hickox's recording of the "London" )is that instruments are present in context, - and are sometimes dominant and at others deliberately subordinate (not just "soft"). They are truly part of an orchestra and an orchestral sound and the internal emotional balance of the composition in a way which some (i hate to say this, Telarc) DSD recordings aren't. There is more to orchestral sound than dynamic range and there are good reasons why we use the word "sonority" instead of just "sound".

Anyway, I felt that the recording brings out the best of PCM and DSD with the result being a very natural orchestral sonority. At times the strings may be silkier and the brass may not blare as much as in some DSD derived recordings, but when the brass is meant to call out, it does, and when the strings are meant to sing out in visionary fashion in the middle of anger and betrayal, they do too!

I've over-run my usual self-imposed review length and still haven't mentioned the other 2 works, the lovely Mass in G minor and the six songs "In time of War", so I'll be brief. The Mass is sharp and dramatic as well as lovely, with, thankfully, women's voices instead of boys' (a purely personal taste, I know, but I HATE pre-pubescent boys' voices, and consequently, most recordings of English choral music). The songs are intense and lyrical. They are both also, to again quote the Penguin Guide, "given superb Chandos sound".

If I sound breathless at the end of this review, it's because that's exactly how I felt when the Symphony ended. Bravo, RVW, LSO, Hickox and Chandos. More, please, more !!!!!

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Balance and Clarity, May 2, 2009

By 

Dr. Debra Jan Bibel "World Music Explorer" (Oakland, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 500 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Vaughan Williams: Symphony No. 4 / Mass in G Minor / Six Choral Songs - Richard Hickox Singers / London Symphony Chorus / London Symphony Orchestra / Richard Hickox (Audio CD)

Having recently heard the San Francisco Symphony perform this symphony and realizing that I did not have it in my collection, I chose this Hickox and the London Symphony Orchestra recording for its high quality engineering and additional choral compositions. I was not disappointed. Symphony 4 has been compared in structure and its shock-and-awe effect with Beethoven's Symphony 5: after Vaughan Williams' lyrical and majestic Sea, London, and Pastoral Symphonies, this composition was strikingly complex and brazen. An orchestra can easily go awry with over and under emphases of sections. Hickox achieves perfect balance within and throughout the work and brings added cohesion. SFO was good, but this recording of the LSO is great. Moreover, the sound was crystal clear and the SACD surround sound was well balanced, although I felt the orchestra a little too distant for my taste. I especially enjoyed the bonus of the mass, with one foot in the Renaissance, and six brief but lovely songs, the latter based on poems of Shelly. If you have never heard this symphony and are familiar with Vaughan Williams mainly from his gentle Lark and London Symphony, discover his other side with this excellent album.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Not Impressive..., July 12, 2010

By 

Choral Music Aficionado (California) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Vaughan Williams: Symphony No. 4 / Mass in G Minor / Six Choral Songs - Richard Hickox Singers / London Symphony Chorus / London Symphony Orchestra / Richard Hickox (Audio CD)

While I will say that the "Symphony No. 4" recording is exceptional (I'd consider it better than LSO), I was not at all impressed with the "Mass in G Minor." I was surprised that the tuning and intonation was not always correct. Expressivity was great, but expression can only go so far when the tuning is incorrect. Soloists were decent, but not the greatest.

Unfortunately, there aren't too many recordings of the "Mass in G Minor" for several reasons. It is a rather challenging piece of literature and the constant tonal shifts made famous by RVW make it difficult for choirs to perform accurately.

Despite my small complaints, I was impressed by the true expression both in the orchestra and choir. The final few bars of the "Agnus Dei" movement were spectacular. Low basses and the tenors did not tune the compacted third interval on the B-flat major chord, but it still gave me the "chills."

I would definitely recommend this CD for the "Symphony No. 4" recording. Otherwise, I'd look elsewhere for a better recording of the "Mass in G Minor."