Very good, Stanley. We must cultivate our garden.

I think in Ken Russells early career he was much more restrained (elgar and delius prime examples) but as time went on he got more and more adventurous culminating in his most outrageous one (imo) Lisztomania- what im sure that shines through though is his obvious enthusiasm for music - i never got to see his film on RVW - I must try and trace it through Amazon or something like that....

I'm off to the Gateshead Sage tonight to hear VW's Symphony no 5, preceded by Ravel's G major Piano Concerto and Butterworth's Banks of Green Willow.

Am not very familiar with the symphony but am really looking forward to the concert.

May well put a report on the Live Concert thread.

Ian.

Quite apart from the fact that RVW 6 is a post-war symphony, DB (started in 1944, completed in 1947, first performance 21 iv 48) I can't help feeling that your frankly glib description of the work does it a tremendous disservice almost on a level with RobG's diatribes against it at TOP: even the briefest of descriptions surely needs to balance the facts of its conflicting emotions of violence and repose and draw attention to the uniqueness of its final movement with its bleached tonal landscape and posing of an unanswered question? It's a deep, complex and occasionally uncomfortable piece, certainly very different to its predecessor, but it's quite as much of a quest, and one that reveals far starker questions; a symphony more for realists than romantics, perhaps.

It was actually one tiny section (the jazzy saxophone tune in the third movement so roundly vilified by RobG) which Sargent suggested was inspired by the sad event, Don: a little more seems to have come from rejected sections of a film score, but most of the rest seems to have come out of that unknown region whence (at least for an agnostic such as RVW) comes inspiration, and whither the sixth appears to be heading by its end. Indeed, the sixth could be seen as suffering from post-war blues and a realisation that yet again huge carnage had resulted in very little other than an even bleaker future.

If the fifth is an analogue of Pilgrim's Progress, then the sixth is its agnostic counterpart, right down to its last kick in the tail of the 'will-it-won't-it end in the right key' ending. For a symphony which is described as being in E minor, there's a chance that all might be well with an E major ending, but the competing alien F minor (incidentally the key of the equally unconsoling fourth) gains the day. Not that that's the end of the matter, for in the ninth, the final expedition in this symphonic journey of journeys, the return to an E minor symphony finds a conclusion where the conflict between E minor and its major is resolved in a blazing version of the latter suggesting a disappearance into some glowing hereafter.

As may well surface in the Bridcutt film, and as already mentioned in passing during the Tony Palmer programme, there is a suggestion that the fourth's bitterness may derive in part from RVW's pent-up frustration at having to deal with a wife who was physically disintegrating, in which case it bears an interesting link to Walton's roughly contemporaneous first symphony, whose first three movements are said to be inspired by successive girlfriends (in which case, boy, he sure could pick 'em).

Bearing in mind that we're talking the mid-1930s, though, I'd point out that the sense of foreboding that many felt seems to have permeated the music of not just these composers but Shostakovich, too. His fourth symphony dates from exactly the same period, and seems similarly infected with an epic bitterness and humour that has a vicious turn. The violence that reportedly shocked so many in RVW 4 hardly springs from nowhere though: it's there in the London Symphony and most definitely in Job the "Masque for Dancing" which despite its rather disparaging title is on very much the same exalted plane as the symphonies, and dates from 1930.

Many thanks for the DVD, Stanley. The postman arrived with it as I was leaving home this morning! What a very welcoming group this is; I only joined three days ago! I will send you a personal email later.
(It's also yet another example of the wonderful service we get from the Royal Mail. I see that you posted it yesterday and I received it at 8.30 this morning, 150 miles away.)

  The Passions of Vaughan Williams;  BBC 4     20.00 hrs      Friday, 23 May 2008

  The Radio Times blurb adds:   'Take that title seriously.   John Bridcut's sizzling documentary reveals Ralph the impulsive heartbreaker, whose lifetime love of young women was the essential spark for his fieriest works and whose music and morals were further coloured by two World wars.   Here, his life story is a thrilling drama with a heart-pounding soundtrack....'              Enough, no more.

Today's Sunday Times Culture Magazine selects the documentary as Pick of the Day.

'Although this is a fine study of a great man, it seems strangely worried that even BBC 4 viewers will switch over instantly on learning he was a classical composer.   As if desperate to sugar the pill of serious music with sex, it opens with a series of testimonials that behind the unkempt tunesmith's nipple-high tweed trousers raged a volcanic heterosexual libido.
With that established, it then feels able to turn to the oeuvre, mixing performance with insights by musical friends highlighting his best works...........Made by John Birdcut (previously responsible for profiles of Britten and Elgar), the film is vividly watchable but can seem perverse because it assumes some things are too obvious to say or play.   We learn nothing of the composer's childhood, are told Ravel influenced him but not that Bruch, Holst or Parry did.....'

Writer John Dugdale continues:    'Obscure pieces are performed but not The Lark Ascending, a Classic FM poll-topper that it's hard to imagine a a South Bank Show profile omitting.'         

I commend your work to the Radio Times, John Dugdale, but must add a rider, away from the sea, that the South Bank Show, 1985, did include The Lark Ascending in Ken Russell's Symphonic Portrait of RVW.