Before conducting the first performance of A Pastoral Symphony with the orchestra of the Royal Philharmonic Society on 26 January 1922, Boult also rehearsed the new symphony with the student orchestra at the Royal College of Music. These rehearsals at the RCM provided a valuable opportunity for Vaughan Williams to decide on the speeds he wanted and any other adjustments he felt were needed. In 1966, Boult related some of the work’s prehistory to Robert Layton: ‘When the Pastoral Symphony was first brewing, Vaughan Williams used to say “Well, I’ve got a new tune” – he always called his works tunes – “I’ve got a new tune and it’s in four movements and they’re all slow. I don’t think anybody will like it much.” Well that was all we heard of the Pastoral Symphony for some time and finally we were allowed to see it. And we had the luck to be allowed to have the use of the parts and rehearse it two or three times with the Royal College of Music orchestra before the first professional performance – the first public performance. And all the time we were rehearsing it – and of course I’d had a bit of time with the score studying it – I’d been on what he felt was very much on the slow side. And the composer was continually at my elbow saying “You must take it faster, faster”.’

At first, before Boult took over, the RCM orchestra had played through the symphony under the college’s director, Charles Villiers Stanford. When illness forced Boult to withdraw from a concert to celebrate Vaughan Wil-liams’s eighty-fifth birthday in October 1957 (including the Pastoral and Job), the composer wrote on 1 October 1957 with some recollections of that time: ‘I still have fragrant memories of early rehearsals of Pastoral – when you were so wonderful & C.V.S[tanford] came & rehearsed & was very kind but rather a nuisance – & told somebody afterwards that it was fluff (I think that was the word).