Dedicated to Michael Mullinar,[1] it was first performed, in its original version, by Sir Adrian Boult and the BBC Symphony Orchestra on 21 April 1948.
[citation needed] Perhaps the composer never intended the symphony to be programmatic, but it was inevitable that his post-war audience should associate its disturbing and often violent character with the detonation of the atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
[3][4] In connection with the last movement, the composer did eventually suggest that a quotation from Act IV of Shakespeare's The Tempest comes close to the music's meaning: "We are such stuff / As dreams are made on; and our little life / Is rounded with a sleep.
"[5] The deaths of the band members in the Café de Paris bombing in 1941 moved him to incorporate elements of jazz, including a saxophone solo in the Scherzo movement.
Structurally, the movement falls loosely into the category of sonata form with its carefully organised contrasting themes and key centres, though this may not be apparent on first hearing.
After an enormous battering climax fuelled by that figure (including the single loudest point in the entire symphony), the movement winds down with a lengthy solo played by the cor anglais, still accompanied by the same three-note ostinato.
The trio section features the tenor saxophone's only true solo role in the symphony; when the scherzo material recurs the composer inverts the fugue subject and eventually combines that form with the original version.
[citation needed] This makes the movement extremely difficult to play, and the audience must use great concentration to keep from losing track of the composer's train of thought.
The first performance was given by the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Sir Adrian Boult at the Royal Albert Hall in London on 21 April 1948.
The first one was made on 21 February 1949 by the Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra of New York under Leopold Stokowski, who had been a fellow organ student of Vaughan Williams at the Royal College of Music in the 1890s (and was to give the U.S. premiere of his Ninth Symphony in 1958).