If your impression of Ralph Vaughan Williams is of quaint, prim, pastoral Britishness, be careful not to spit-take your Earl Grey as you take in the searing, tea-cup-rattling chords that seismically open his Fourth Symphony. This is the sound not of a lark ascending, but of a lark being shredded by the razor-sharp talons of a falcon, with brash low brass, tense motifs, and a manic, throttling scherzo far more akin to Shostakovich and Prokofiev than his British contemporaries Walton, Holst, Bax, or Britten. For all of Vaughan Williams’s claims that the 1935 work was “pure music” and that “all [he] knew was that it’s what [he] wanted to do at the time,” his incipient dread of the horrors that would ravage Europe in the ensuing decade is palpable. Many performances are more polished than this 2013 live recording from Ryan Wigglesworth and the London Philharmonic Orchestra, but none come close to achieving its visceral, violent bite. 

Vaughan Williams’s Eighth is the only other of his nine symphonies to end loudly and forms a natural pairing with the Fourth. Recorded five years earlier with then-principal conductor Vladimir Jurowski, the LPO immerses into the work’s fantastical, celesta-dotted soundworld with equal character and conviction.