A London Symphony

A London Symphony was Vaughan Williams’s first wholly orchestral symphony and his first large-scale orchestral composition. It owes its origin to George Butterworth, the gifted composer who was killed on the Somme in 1916. First performed on 27th March 1914, conducted by Geoffrey Toye, A London Symphony was immediately acclaimed, but the composer was not satisfied and he revised and cut it for performances under Adrian Boult in 1918.

The score was first published in 1920 and bore a dedication to the memory of Butterworth. Further cuts were made in the 1930s when the revised score was published. In 1951, when Vaughan Williams revised the orchestration of the six symphonies he had written he left the London alone, writing to Sir John Barborolli that it was ‘past mending, though indeed with all its faults I love it still – indeed it is my favourite of my family of six’.