SO, WHERE NEXT…?
We suggest works to explore after Vaughan Williams’s A Sea Symphony
Vaughan Williams Toward the Unknown Region
A Sea Symphony was not the only work in which Vaughan Williams set Walt Whitman, a poet whom, he said towards at the end of his life, ‘I’ve never got over, I’m glad to say’. Three years before the symphony’s premiere at the Leeds Festival, VW had scored a major success at that same festival with Toward the Unknown Region, a setting for choir and orchestra of Whitman’s ‘Darest thou now O soul’. The poem shares much of its imagery and atmosphere with the text of ‘The Explorers’, A Sea Symphony’s visionary concluding movement. Beginning with a cautious tread, VW’S 12-minute work ends in a blaze of excitement. Recommended recording: Corydon Singers and Orchestra/matthew Best Hyperion CDA 66655
Delius Sea Drift
Vaughan Williams was not alone among British composers in responding to the heady attractions of Whitman’s poetry. In 1904, when VW had already started work on A Sea Symphony, Delius completed Sea Drift, a 25-minute piece for chorus and baritone soloist, using texts from Whitman’s seminal ‘Leaves of Grass’ collection. Although Vaughan Williams was generally unenthusiastic about Delius’s music, there is a palpable overlap between the brooding, rhapsodic atmosphere of Delius’s setting and the lonely soloist of ‘On The Beach At Night, Alone’, the second movement of A Sea Symphony. Delius’s idiom is more obviously seeped in Wagner than VW’S, making for intriguing comparisons. Recommended recording: bryn Terfel (baritone); Bournemouth Symphony Chorus and Orchestra/richard Hickox Chandos CHAN 10868X
Stanford Songs of the Sea
Charles Villiers Stanford was at one point Vaughan Williams’s composition teacher, and as conductor of the Leeds Festival was instrumental in getting A Sea Symphony performed there. Stanford’s own Songs of the Sea were premiered at Leeds in 1904, and Vaughan Williams knew them well. The influence of Stanford’s swashbuckling orchestration can be vividly felt in the ‘rude brief recitative’ episode of A Sea Symphony’s opening movement, and in its swirling Scherzo. ‘Homeward bound’, the fourth of five songs in Stanford’s cycle, is more reflective in tone, adumbrating the expansive, valedictory panorama of A Sea Symphony’s finale. Recommended recording: Gerald Finley (baritone); BBC National Orchestra of Wales/richard Hickox Chandos CHSA 5043
Holst The Cloud Messenger
While Vaughan Williams was composing A Sea Symphony, his close friend Gustav Holst was writing several choral settings of ancient Vedic Sanskrit Hymns in which he explored unusual scales and metres. It is curious, then, that in his last Indian-inspired work, The Cloud Messenger, completed in 1912, Holst returned to the rousing style of VW’S Sea Symphony. It’s a similarly ambitious work for large chorus and orchestra, but starts quite differently, its forlorn instrumental opening portraying the protagonist’s exile from his homeland and his beloved wife; yet its stirring first choral entry evokes the aspiring quality of A Sea Symphony. VW’S work is again evoked in Holst’s hushed choral ending when the Cloud safely delivers the message to the distant beloved, the orchestra’s gently alternating chords recalling Sea Symphony’s tranquil end. Recommended recording: Della Jones (mezzo-soprano); London Symphony Chorus & Orchestra/ Richard Hickox Chandos CHAN 8901
Elgar The Dream of Gerontius
Vaughan Williams attended the premiere of Elgar’s choral masterpiece The Dream of Gerontius in 1900, and studied its orchestration avidly in the years after. There are many moments in A Sea Symphony where the influence of Elgar’s score is evident, especially in the more introspective moments of the opening movement, and in the numinous finale. But there are fascinating points of difference too: while both works share a sense of spiritual questing, Elgar’s hero conceives his destiny primarily in terms of Catholic theology, while Vaughan Williams inclines towards the doctrinally non-specific pantheism and nature mysticism espoused in Whitman’s stirring poetry. Recommended recording: Andrew Staples (tenor), Catherine Wyn-rogers (mezzosoprano), Thomas Hampson (baritone); Staatsopernchor & RIAS Kammerchor; Staatskapelle Berlin/daniel Barenboim Decca 483 1585
Bridge The Sea
By the time A Sea Symphony was premiered in October 1910, Vaughan Williams’s English contemporary Frank Bridge was also writing a four-movement work on a similar theme, the orchestral suite The Sea. Bridge’s take on the ocean admits darker hues into its orchestral palette, and was harmonically advanced enough for its period to cause the young Benjamin Britten to be ‘knocked sideways’ when he first heard it as a boy. Britten later became Bridge’s first and only pupil, and his Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes (another locus classicus of British maritime music) make a fitting companion to Bridge’s The Sea. Recommended recording: Ulster Orchestra/ Vernon Handley Chandos CHAN 10426X