While driving home after a tiresome day at work yesterday, I was treated to a radio broadcast of a complete performance of Vaughan Williams Symphony #5–in this case, the near legendary RCA recording by Andre Previn.
Here is a small clip of Previn’s conducting the opening movement of the symphony, but on another occasion, with an entirely different orchestra. Youtube provides the rest of Previn’s reading, in the form of a series of clips , and I welcome any of those moved by the opening to click onto them.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-3EWTM9dlkIf there are any twentieth century musical works in which artistic beauty convincingly intimates something of divine glory, I believe that this symphony is among them.
A question I grapple with over and over again is the relation of musical beauty to divine glory. Involved here are a myriad of issues: among them, how much musical beauty can reflect/communicate divine glory; how explicitly Christian a musical composition must be in order to do so; which genres are more apt to succeed in echoing divine glory; and which received compositions are indeed such echo-ers?
I am interested in others’ reactions to the Vaughan Williams piece and, more importantly, their musings on the aforementioned aesthetic matters.
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