Symphony No. 2 in G Major

A London Symphony is the second of Vaughan Williams’ nine symphonies, and it was his first purely orchestral work on a large scale. In 1910, the first performances of his Tallis Fantasia for strings and his choral A Sea Symphony had established him as the leading English composer of his generation. He later recalled how his fellow composer George Butterworth then said to him, “You know, you ought to write a symphony.” Reluctant at first, but also incentivised, Vaughan Williams expanded the material of a projected symphonic poem about London into a four-movement symphony. By 1913, A London Symphony, dedicated to Butterworth, was complete, and it was successfully performed a year later. The work’s symphonic-poem origins determined some of the musical ideas. In the first movement and the finale, a harp gently plays the chimes of Westminster’s Big Ben clock tower; and according to the composer’s friend and biographer Michael Kennedy, the slow movement’s flickering piccolo solo represents a lavender seller’s cry. Vaughan Williams subsequently regarded A London Symphony as too long and uneven, and he revised it twice, in 1918 and 1933. The final version, standard today, is about 17 minutes shorter than the hour-long 1913 score. Recordings of both earlier versions have shown that the original is indeed prolix compared to its more clearly focused successors. But some beautiful material was omitted in the revision process, especially from the slow movement.