increase the volume), with the further admonishment senza espressivo, meaning without any expression. 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. Vaughan Williams himself, in his aforementioned programme note, speaks of “drifting” and “whiffs of theme” in characterising the music. This is the movement that sparked so many to see the work as a whole as being a vision of a post-nuclear world. Writers have used such words as “dead”, “barren”, and “ruins” to describe it. Curiously enough, both the second and fourth movements have the same tempo marking but the feel is decidedly slower here. The symphony continues to provoke much speculation about its "meaning", and the only clue from Vaughan Williams himself (as quoted by his widow), points us in the direction of an agnostic Nunc dimittis. A typical performance takes about 35 minutes. It is scored for a large orchestra including: 2 flutes, piccolo (doubling 3rd flute), 2 oboes, cor anglais, 2 clarinets in B, tenor saxophone (doubling bass clarinet in B), 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns in F, 3 trumpets in B, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, side drum, triangle, bass drum, cymbals, xylophone, harp (optionally doubled), and strings. Performance history 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. Serge Koussevitzky led the score's American premiere on 7 August 1948, at Tanglewood, with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Before that year was out, the same musicians had taken the work to Boston, Pittsburgh and Chicago (3 December). Recordings The first two recordings were initially released on 78rpm discs. 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). The second was by Sir Adrian Boult days later with the London Symphony Orchestra. Both used the original version of the third movement. The composer revised that movement in 1950; Boult immediately recorded it for HMV and that new version was included in the subsequent LP releases. Boult also made a new recording of the symphony in late 1953 for Decca in the