From Film Score To Symphony

In one of the coincidences of the way I am taking these disks "off the shelf" ( I've been going from alternate ends of different shelves to give a bit of variety ) it is a quick return to the cd player for Vaughan Williams. This one is the Sinfonia Antartica by Bernard Haitink with the London Philharmonic Orchestra and Choir and soprano soloist Sheila Armstrong. Regarded as Vaughan Williams's 7th symphony, Sinfonia Antartica began as film music written for the the movie Scott Of The Antarctic about the doomed attempt to be first to the South Pole. As that would imply, it is a programmatic work and doesn't contain any of the characteristics of his earlier work ( not surprisingly, the Antarctic isn't exactly a pastoral landscape and I doubt if the explorers found much time for singing folk songs ) The conversion to a symphony does more than just reprogramme the film music into a performing suite however. It's an often bleak but majestic work with the voices used to represent the keening ound of the wind at crucial points in the score.