The Philadelphia Orchestra premieres Vaughan Williams's Fourth Symphony

Such was, for this listener at least, the highlight of a program chosen by Music Director Yannick Nézet-Séguin to mark his own 40th birthday. For the first time, Philadelphia audiences got to hear the Fourth Symphony of Ralph Vaughan Williams, in a concert that also featured two far more familiar works, Haydn’s Oxford Symphony and the Beethoven Third Piano Concerto, with Emanuel Ax as soloist in the latter.

These three works had more in common than might at first appear, as each represented a milestone for its composer. The Haydn Oxford — Symphony No. 92 — was the first of the set of 12 that he composed on commission for what would be a triumphant and highly profitable tour of England, the apex of his career. These were Haydn’s last and most mature essays in the form, and they are still grouped together, not only biographically but musicologically. There is no great leap between Haydn’s 91st Symphony in E-flat and the 92nd, but, all the same, there is a new assurance in the writing, the sense of a master perfecting the form he himself had created more than 30 years earlier.

Beethoven’s entire career, in contrast, is a set of quantum leaps that remake, again and again, the major orchestral and chamber music genres of his time: the symphony, the concerto, the string quartet, and the sonata. His Piano Concerto No. 3 is one such leap, although the two keyboard concertos that were to follow it, especially the Emperor Concerto, set a final standard of excellence that is unsurpassed to the present day. Up to its time of composition in 1803, however, when Beethoven was all of 32, there had been nothing like its assertiveness and stride, even in the great late concertos of Mozart.

Fierce and unrelenting

Perhaps the most startling of these works in the context of a composer’s career profile, however, was Vaughan Williams's Fourth Symphony. Nothing in his previous work had prepared the English public for the fierce and unrelenting cadences of this music. Hitherto associated with modally tinged evocations of the English countryside, Vaughan Williams launched the Fourth with a brutally dissonant fusillade that, even in quieter passages, carried the music without concession or compromise through its roughly half-hour length. The result seemed to have surprised the composer himself, although his famous comment about the score — “I don’t know whether I like it, but it’s what I meant to say” — should perhaps be taken with a grain of salt. More to the point, he defended it as no less “beautiful” than his more accessible works. Beauty, he noted, could arise out of the consideration of distinctly unbeautiful things, such as Lear’s travail on the heath or even the vivisection of Rembrandt’s School of Anatomy.

This remark of course raised the question of what “unbeautiful” thing might have inspired the Fourth. Vaughan Williams, defending the right of abstract composition to be considered strictly on its own formal merits apart from all outside associations, denied that it had reference to the war clouds gathering over Europe in the 1930s, but it was so taken by critics, as was the other splash of that London concert season, William Walton’s First Symphony. Of course, both points of view may be valid, and in this case I think they are. The middle set of Vaughan Williams’s nine symphonies, four through six, can be seen as a war trilogy, and as such perhaps the core of his achievement.

The Fourth is not “about” war, or violence, or even more primitive foreboding; it is the response of a great musical mind and a man of compassionate temperament to deeply troubling circumstances, with all the richness and complexity that implies. The Fifth, written in the midst of World War II itself, would harken back to the pastoral style of the Third Symphony, but its evocation of the timeless peace of the English countryside would be a statement, in the midst of conflict, of the enduring beauty and value that violence could only make more dear, and more finally real. The Sixth, written just after the war, would return to the jagged idiom of the Fourth, but on a larger, more questioning scale. Altogether, these works are a monumental meditation on the most tragic events of the 20th century — perhaps, indeed, of all human history itself. That it has taken nearly a century for the Fourth Symphony to reach an important musical capital is certainly a comment of sorts, but Nézet-Séguin has at last brought it here, and thanks are owed for that.

A desolate revelation

As to the performance — Thursday’s was canceled, due to the inclement weather that prevented a full complement of musicians from arriving — it was appropriately powerful and well-shaped, although it could have breathed a little more in the first movement. Nézet-Séguin is the anti-Eschenbach, and he occasionally sacrifices depth for propulsion; but he did hit his stride, and Jeffrey Khaner’s wonderful flute solo, which ends the second movement Andante, will surely be a highlight of this year’s concert season. It is a desolating moment in the music, but also a revelation of the composer’s inmost spirit.

The Oxford Symphony, which opened the program, is top-drawer Haydn, but then, he never wrote anything uninteresting, or did the same thing twice: Each of his 104 symphonies is a fresh experiment. Nézet-Séguin, having been just serenaded by the orchestra for his birthday, led a chipper performance, if not a particularly revelatory one, while Emanuel Ax, as the soloist in the Beethoven Third Piano Concerto, easily matched the conductor’s verve and panache, but also dug deep in the more ruminative moments of the middle movement Largo. I wish Lang Lang, he of the prodigious technique and the artistic indiscipline, would take a year off to go to school with Ax. He’d learn a lot about the way music is supposed to be made.