Download Vaughan Williams – A Sea Symphony

Vaughan Williams – A Sea Symphony
Following is an extract from the choir’s programme note for Vaughan Williams’ Sea
Symphony to be performed on Saturday July 31st at 7.30pm at Hartlepool’s Borough Hall.
A fuller version, along with recommendations on available recordings and much more
fascinating information, is included in the concert programme, which can be bought on
the night of the concert.
This year sees the centenary of A Sea Symphony. The first performance was given at the
1910 Leeds Festival, where, twenty-one years later, Walton’s Belshazzar’s Feast would also
first be heard. Vaughan Williams himself conducted it on his thirty-eighth birthday (12th
October) with Cicely Gleeson-White and Campbell McInnes as soloists and the composer
Edward Bairstow at the organ. Never a particularly confident conductor, even of his own
music, VW was understandably nervous on the day, but the timpanist, a burly exColdstream Guardsman, settled him down and told him not to worry. ‘You just give us a
good square four-in-the-bar, and we’ll do the rest!’. Evidently, he had simply not realized
the power of the work he had created, and the opening choral fortissimo ‘Behold the sea
itself’, followed by the full weight of the huge orchestra and organ, nearly knocked him off
his rostrum!
The performance was a resounding success: ‘… there is no denying the presence of great
imaginative poetry … the symphony definitely places a new figure in the first rank of English
composers … in scope, much the finest piece of sea music that we, a sea-faring folk above
everything, possess’, wrote The Manchester Guardian, clearly very much in tune with the
mood of the era, as well as much impressed by the music itself. ……
Michael Kennedy, the music historian, critic and biographer of VW, who, as a young man,
became a close personal friend of the elderly composer, writes: ‘Vaughan Williams was to
write greater choral works than the Sea Symphony, but none of them has become so
popular with choral societies as this early work, written at the zenith of English choral
singing.’ VW himself was always especially fond of the piece – ‘a fine song for singing, a fine
song to hear’, he called it – and MK goes on: ‘It passes the test of all great music – one finds
more in it, not less, as the years go by.’ Like another work also first heard in 1910, Elgar’s
Violin Concerto, A Sea Symphony is, again to quote MK, ‘profuse in melodic invention,
having enough tunes to last some composers for three symphonies’. It would, in fact, be the
first of nine that VW went on to produce in the course of his long and fruitful composing life.
JH/FH