Vaughan Williams Symphony No 2 1913 version 

Well said. I have that CD and there isn't a year that goes by where I don't listen to it. It is extraordinary. And so well done.

I agree with every your word! I'm not from the UK, nonetheless I have similar feelings. Something familiar to me, yet distant from the past/future. Who knows. He takes us... Toward the Unknown Region 😊 BTW, outstanding performance comparable to premiere recording by Hickox with the LSO (Chandos, 2001).

He certainly is not underrated in Great Britain. But the he bulk of his music has never caught on in the United States.

@@remomazzetti8757 I dunno, raised as an Episcopolian, our hymnal was just crawling with settings or orginal tunes, and later when I became a Catholic, our hymnal is filled with RVW. In fact, we just heard a harp solo version of "For All the Saints" yesterday, wafted after 630am Holy Mass from the loft. Lofty enough, one of my favorites. I sang his "I Heard the Voice of Jesus Say" at my mother's bed in CCU when she passed, a bit older than RVW. And the last word of it was the last one of any song she heard. Well, other than angels no doubt. Maybe they belted out the refrain, who knows. So, there's that, from the grear Brit!

It’s the most spine-tingling moment in all music as far as I am concerned!

Check out Andrew Manzi !!!

I, we, had the great good fortune of singing the Brahms Requiem under his baton in late June of 1997 in St. David's Hall, and it was quite a happenstance, especially given the soloist, Sir Bryn Terfel, who signed our vocal scores under what turned out, as I looked up when he signed, an 8ft. oil painting of himself! (Must be nice to be Cardiff's favorite son.) Hickox has just won a Grammy a few months before for his take on "Peter Grimes". He stayed in the lobby of the Hall some few yards from us for some good while talking to friends as the throng of us got our autographs from the soon-to-be Knight of the Realm. I was in straits, torn between missing out on contact with one or the other legends (immortals?) and just before Terfel poised his pen to sign mine, I glanced back wistfully to see Maestro Hickox suddenly alone for a moment, glance at his watch, and swingjing his satchel (orchestral score, no doubt?) and duck out a side door. I was *that* close. I was a bit heartbroken 11 years later to read he left us so early, only 60, having died in his sleep at a hotel nearby. His face has so much of the best of Swansea, shared by another favorite son, Dylan Thomas. But he will always be with us, as in this video, and I am sure in all the other ways. We had the pleasure, just our visiting chorus of going through a dress rehearsal with him in a little practice room the night before, in rolled up sleeves and street clothes What an ineffably great treat, I was new to the chorus and thought I had died and gone straight to Heaven, without even passing "GO!" (Thanks to the host for posting this.)

It all sounds like RVW to me.

Hardly! It's all RVW but each version reflects his own personal development as a composer of symphonies.

But the second movement in the familiar version has a wonderful climax that we don't get in the original!

Views have increased, but still not many comments.

Who knows. However the 1913 version went missing for a while (like, he sent the only score original to Germany for a performance there, and before it got sent back to England, some Austrian archduke went to serbia and got shot, prompting Russia to get so angry they made Germany invade France, meaning the British didn't speak to Germans on friendly terms for a few decades.) The subsequent versions were reconstructed from instrumentalist part copies.

@@musicalaviator Actually RVW rewrote it and discarded what he called "meanderings".

Care to elaborate?

Everybody's a critic these days. But uninformed personal opinion means nothing.