Fight!

Jessica Duchen provides a handy roundup of the opening salvos of the London orchestras' new seasons today. But what's this?

So Stravinsky and Vaughan Williams emerge as flavours of the month, which is an interesting combination since Stravinsky could probably have eaten Vaughan Williams for breakfast, given half a chance.

I'm not convinced. A Google Fight would appear to back Jessica up, but given that Vaughan Williams was very tall and hefty (over 6', I think), and Stravinsky was a measly 5'3", surely Ralph would whup Igor's ass?

Prom 10: BBC Philharmonic / Tortelier (RAH)

Another dish of meat and potatoes? I must watch it, I'll get fat(ter).

Arnold Bax is one of those composers. You know the sort - English, tonal, vaguely post-romantic, championed by a lot of slightly scary obsessive middle-aged men who can't understand why this doesn't get played all the time on the radio instead of all that modern rubbish, and form a society (fan club) to prove their devotion. There's nothing exactly wrong with In memoriam, which receives its first public performance here. It's inoffensive waffle, and slightly less glum than Bax often is. But I was still bored by the end, as I always am by Bax. In a while I'll forget about this piece and start fretting again that he's a compose I ought to listen to more of. But i don't think I'll ever hear anything that'll actually make me want to.

Rachmaninov is surely near the top of anyone's list of composers you ought to think are a load of rubbish but don't. He ought to be irredeemably cheesy, but there's something about him that stops short of that. He's at least as glum as Bax, but people don't seem to comment on that much. His First Piano Concerto isn't played as often as the later ones, and it becomes clear that this is because it's not as good as them. It's okay, all the elements of his sound are there, but at this stage in his career he hadn't quite worked out how to stitch the bits together effectively. Yevgeny Sudbin plays brilliantly (as do the orchestra), and also looks frighteningly young from my perspective in the foothills of middle age. "But he's a child!" I think. He was born in 1980, so he's hardly a prodigy by now. But that seems practically foetal to me.

Vaughan Williams' Fourth Symphony is one of those pieces that always astonishes, not least because it's by Vaughan Williams. When I was young and foolish, I thought old RVW to be a crashing bore (Yawn Williams, I called him. God, I was funny). Then I heard this and the Sixth and realised I was going to have to change my mind. Would this extraordinary, violent and dissonant work get such an enthusiastic reception if it wasn't presented under the name of the patron saint of Classic FM, composer of The Lark Ascending?

Everything's here that hasn't really been about so far in the concert: anger, tension, and also a very sardonic sense of humour. Not a cowpat in sight. It's hot in the hall tonight, very close and sweaty. But that hardly registers when you're gripped by music this powerful.

RVW: Let's Get It On

The Passions of Vaughan Williams was an entertaining, if slight, documentary last night that took as its thesis that all that stuff we thought was about cows and country meadows was actually about shagging and fighting. It featured a lot of old ladies talking about sex, which is always an instructive experience.

I'd say more, but I'm trapped in relocation hell at the moment and really should get on with the packing. Normal service will be resumed shortly.

It's repeated tonight at 7.00 on BBC4, or you can blahblah iPlayer. And while I'm at it here's an interview with the man himself.

Obviously I'll be deeply possessed with Euro-fever by then. Assuming I'm not trapped under a collapsed tower of boxes.

RVW would have felt right at home in the world of blogging, as this photo of him with a cat demonstrates.

Prom 18: Delius/Tippett/Vaughan Williams (RAH)

Ah, Delius, the syphilitic old fascist. There are those who go into raptures about his music, but I'm afraid I'm not one of them. " A Song of Summer" meandered along in a turn of the century, sub-Debussy sort of way, all very lush and ripe but lacking in much substance. A nagging thought kept knocking in my skull that I'd heard it somewhere before, which coalesced into a realisation that what it really reminded me of was "By the Sleepy Lagoon" without the tune. So, Delius: a poor man's Eric Coates.

I mentioned Tippett yesterday in comparison to Henze, and, serendipitously, here is his Triple Concerto. Tippett's an idiosyncratic composer, to put it mildly; depending on whether you're in the mood for him he can seem luxuriantly rhapsodic or rambling; there are many gestures that sound appealingly knotty when you're feeling sympathetic, and clumsy when you're not. And then he floors you with something of such breathtaking beauty that you have to forgive him. But in a time when so many composers are turning out expertly crafted, glowingly orchestrated and timidly empty scores, Tippett stands against the cult of fetishistic surface perfection and insists on music as a social force that can attempt to say something.

And so to Vaughan Williams' Fifth Symphony. It's such a shame that such transcendentally beautiful music as this gets dismissed as "cowpat music", and it makes me wonder what it is about the English that makes them unable to believe that one of their own might produce something worthy to stand alongside the greats, which this symphony undoubtedly does, in my view. It's elegant pastoral skin conceals an underlying muscular system that is as steely as the tumultuous fourth and sixth symphonies that stand either side of it. And in Andrew Davies you couldn't hope for a better guide through this music. In fact the experience reminds me just how good the BBC Symphony Orchestra were when he was their principal conductor, before he left and they fell into a dreadful slump (I recall a performance they gave a few years ago at the Proms under Jukka-Pekka Saraste of Lutoslawski's Concerto for Orchestra that I still remember as the worst performance I have ever heard a professional orchestra give). They have turned the corner, and Jiri Belohlavek has certainly raised their game, but they still have more work to do to return to their former heights. They played wonderfully tonight, and they should always play this well.