In what year did Vaughan Williams record the Fifth Symphony?
Vaughan Williams conducted a handful of recordings for gramophone and radio. His studio recordings are the overture to The Wasps, and the ballet Old King Cole (both made in 1925), Dona Nobis Pacem (1936), and the Fourth Symphony (1937). Live concert tapings include the Serenade to Music, and the Fifth Symphony, recorded in 1951 and 1952, respectively. There is a recording of Vaughan Williams conducting the St Matthew Passion with his Leith Hill Festival forces. In the early days of LP in the 1950s Vaughan Williams was better represented in the record catalogues than most British composers. The Record Guide (1955) contained nine pages of listings of his music on disc, compared with five for Walton, and four apiece for Elgar and Britten.All the composer's major works and many of the minor ones have been recorded. There have been numerous complete LP and CD sets of the nine symphonies, beginning with Boult's Decca cycle of the 1950s, most of which was recorded in the composer's presence. Although rarely staged, the operas have fared well on disc. The earliest recording of a Vaughan Williams opera was Hugh the Drover, in an abridged version conducted by Sargent in 1924. Since the 1960s there have been stereophonic recordings of Hugh the Drover, Sir John in Love, Riders to the Sea, The Poisoned Kiss, and The Pilgrim's Progress. Most of the orchestral recordings have been by British orchestras and conductors, but notable non-British conductors who have made recordings of Vaughan Williams's works include Herbert von Karajan, Leonard Bernstein, Leopold Stokowski, and, most frequently, André Previn, who conducted the London Symphony Orchestra in the first complete stereo cycle of the symphonies, recorded between 1967 and 1972. Among the British conductors most closely associated with Vaughan Williams's music on disc and in concert in the generations after Boult, Sargent and Barbirolli are Vernon Handley, Richard Hickox, Sir Mark Elder and Sir Andrew Davis. Record companies with extensive lists of Vaughan Williams recordings include EMI, Decca, Chandos, Hyperion and Naxos.
1952