This is a really good performance [of the Pastoral]. On one level Martyn Brabbins is superbly alert to the intricacies of the musical texture. After on hearing I got the score and listened again – so many details I’d hardly noticed before, but there they were. On another level I’ve rarely, if ever, been so aware of this symphony as a subtle but sustained emotional narrative…Brabbins’s Fourth has many of the same virtues, plus an edgy, uncomfortable intensity of its own.

[Symphony No. 3] when soprano Elizabeth Watts re-enters to bestow the final benediction, the effect is as moving as any recorded performance in living memory.

One immediately feels Brabbins’s special affinity for this music in the numinous pacing of the first movement of the Pastoral Symphony... Brabbins and the Hyperion recording team bring a thrilling clarity to the heavier timbres of the Scherzo and the diaphanous, mercurial (even Holst-like) coda...Brabbins’s reading of the first movement of the Fourth Symphony has much of the familiar violence and ferocity that we know from this work.

Brabbins produces a beautifully measured and contemplative reading... Elizabeth Watts...finds an ideal balance between an other-worldly rapture and a more humane warmth... without doubt a very impressive and deeply felt performance.

Brabbins nevertheless gives [the third movement of the Pastoral] a sense of sarabande-like spaciousness...Watts’s vocalises book-ending the final movement are especially worthy of note...The Fourth Symphony could hardly be more contrasting; the performance lives up to the work’s reputation as a ferocious, dissonant one...Brabbins tailors his approach accordingly, with the complexity of Vaughan Williams’s textures calling forth a much-needed clarity of sound that allows the ear to pick out each motif.

These fine performances let one take the measure of VW’s greatness; the brief, choral-orchestral Saraband Helen is an attractive filler.

There is some great playing in the urgent, doomy opening of the first movement [of the Fourth] and in the strenuous polyphony of the frenetic finale, coolly directed by Brabbins in this much recommended landmark recording.

This superlatively played album is topped off by an unfinished Vaughan Williams discovery, a vocal saraband, spun from Christopher Marlowe’s lines in Doctor Faustus about Helen of Troy. Welcome but minor, it’s perfect for lovers of fascinating morsels.

This “Pastoral” Symphony is unequivocally excellent...Brabbins taps into the underlying melancholy...Wind and brass solos are outstanding...Exceptionally good, and handsomely recorded too.