VAUGHAN WILLIAMS. Dona Nobis Pacem*. Toward The Unknown Region. Sheila Armstrong (soprano)*, John Carol Case (baritone)*, London Phil- harmonic Choir and Orchestra conducted by Sir Adrian Boult. HMV ASD2962 (L240). Texts included.

Dona Nobis Pacem:

Christensen, Metcalf, Chorus, Utah SO, Abravanal (10/87) (9/72) (R) VSD71159

Dona Nobis Pacem has always been something of a puzzle in Vaughan Williams's music, generally blamed for the unevenness of the material and at the same time excused because the material was assembled from different stages of his career. There can be little disagreement from the view that the central Whitman setting, "Dirge for Two Veterar.s", does not accord very well with the Biblical phrases of the last section, and that the recurrence of the soprano prayer of the title cannot serve to impose unity upon the work. Yet in a performance as strong as this, such considerations are, if not swept aside, certainly set in perspective beside the grandeur and compassion of most of the music. The unevenness remains a pity; it is not merely a question of music of different phases of Vaughan Williams's career and, frankly, different artistic achievement being set together with some of his most splendid ideas, but a question of those ideas being given thereby something less than their most effective presentation. The triumph lies in the power of the Dirge, and of the two previous Whitman passages, to dominate the imagination of the listener.

Such a work might have been conceived for the interpretative mastery of Sir Adrian Boult. Time and again Vaughan Williams spoke of how his music seemed only to come to life when Boult stepped onto the rostrum at early rehearsals, how certain passages and movements were only really discovered by him for the gratification of a composer notoriously modest about his music, and at times seeming positively bemused by what he had written. Boult's steadiness gives the Dirge an overwhelming sense of the grave procession advancing and passing; with the central climax, there is that marvellous sense which is the property of only the greatest conductors, that the climax is not forced out of the players and singers, but released from them. His just and proportionate musicianship holds the entire work together in something close to a single imaginative act; it is not in the early, well-knit cantata Toward the Unknown Region but in this diverse but moving work that the real power is to be found.

Sir Adrian has a close association with his producer Christopher Bishop in the studio (readers will recall his birthday tribute in April, p. 1843), and this is a splendid recording above all for its qualities of patience and proportion: there is no