Mahler composer a sea symphony lyrics
Vaughan Williams: A Sea Symphony
Now available in discrete multi-channel surround SACD as well as the CD recording!
Robert Spano, who recently completed his inaugural season as Music Director of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, won widespread acclaim for his first Telarc recording with the ASO, Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade and Russian Easter Overture (CD-80568), termed by one critic “the best rendition of [Scheherazade] to come around in years…I can’t imagine a more distinguished or appealing first release.” Here he leads the ASO and Chorus in a breathtaking performance of the monumental Sea Symphony by Vaughan Williams, with gifted soloists Christine Goerke, soprano, and Brett Polegato, baritone. A Sea Symphony, produced by Thomas C. Moore, won three GRAMMY Awards in 2003 for Best Classical Album, Best Choral Performance and Best Engineered Album (Michael Bishop, engineer).
A Sea Symphony, Vaughan Williams’ epic setting of texts by American poet Walt Whitman, was his first and hardest-won symphonic work. As an organist and choir director himself, Vaughan Williams was confident of his writing ability for chorus, but he was unsure of his competence in the orchestral arena. He worked with composer Maurice Ravel in Paris for three months before he felt able to complete A Sea Symphony. It quickly established him as the foremost English composer of his generation. A Sea Symphony is a true choral symphony—the chorus is used more often in it than in Mahler’s Eighth Symphony, which was premiered in the same year (1910). The symphony is in four movements: “A Song for All Seas, All Ships;” “On the Beach at Night, Alone;” “Scherzo: The Waves;” and the final, majestic movement, “The Explorers.”
The late ASO Music Director Emeritus Robert Shaw never performed A Sea Symphony with the Atlanta forces. It was at the suggestion of one of the members of the ASO
The Symphonies of Ralph Vaughan Williams
In classical music, we concern ourselves with a truly vast amount of art. It’s easy for some pockets of the repertoire to be ignored simply by virtue of the fact that there’s so much of it. If a composer is at the same time regarded as unfashionable, then some great masterpieces can go unnoticed.
These are the sorts of issues at the back of my mind when I approach the music of the English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams (He pronounced “Ralph” as “Rafe”). Born in 1872, Vaughan Williams is largely remembered today for a small handful of popular works; among these are The Lark Ascending and the Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis. He was able to compose in an accessible, popular style on the one hand, and in a deeper, more personal and less-populist style on the other. To tar Vaughan Williams with the “English pastoral” brush is to do him a grave disservice. Certainly he wrote comfortably and often in what we glibly call the English pastoral style, but there are many works in the Vaughan Williams canon which bear testimony to his true individuality and his true claim to be part of the international mainstream of western music. The backbone of this claim are his nine symphonies, and it’s these symphonies which I want to survey here.
Vaughan Williams called his first symphony A Sea Symphony. It is a huge work, for chorus, soloists and an enormous orchestra, lasting well over an hour. Setting poetry by Walt Whitman, the work falls into the traditional four movements of a symphony, and it was premiered at the Leeds festival on the composer’s 38th birthday: 12 October 1910.
The Sea Symphony immediately confirmed the prominent place Vaughan Williams had begun to hold in the preceding few years as one of the leading British composers. What is truly remarkable about it is the breadth of its vision. Far from being just about ships, waves and water, the work takes the visionary poetry of Walt Whitman and use Versatility in a composer does not, of itself, guarantee greatness; nor, for that matter, does doing things that have not been done before. Vaughan Williams was both versatile and original, but he was much more than that. We know that at around the time he began sketching the first of his nine symphonies—A Sea Symphony—he came into contact with English folk song, and the effect on his own music was indeed profound. This was not quite the equivalent of a Damascene conversion, for in several of his original songs, written prior to his involvement in the English folk song revival, his musical idiom is couched in similar terms: in 1901, Linden Lea, in 1902 Blackmwore by the Stour, in 1903 itself, Tears, Idle Tears, Silent Noon and The Winter’s Willow. These songs are clearly the work of a distinctive English composer with a deep feeling for words. Yet coincidentally coming into contact with ethnic English folk song may well have been akin to finding that which, instinctively, he felt was there all along. Such a view is reinforced by the recent unearthing, and public premiere in 2011, of A Cambrid A Sea Symphony - Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872 - 1958) After the death of Purcell in 1695, English music went into a long period of decline that lasted until the late 19 century. Eventually the tireless efforts of Charles Stanford, Hubert Parry and others brought about the long-awaited English musical renaissance, which reached its full flowering with the emergence of Edward Elgar. He was followed by a whole new generation of talented composers, the leading figure of which was Ralph Vaughan Williams, who for half a century remained one of the most influential figures in English music. Like Elgar, he too was a late developer, reaching his mid-thirties before attracting serious attention as a composer. As the 19 century gave way to the 20 the work of the American poet Walt Whitman seemed to many to capture the essence of the new age, portraying an optimistic vision of a world inspired by human and scientific endeavour and the spirit of adventure. As well as Vaughan Williams, several other British composers - notably Holst and Delius - turned to Whitman’s groundbreaking collection, Leaves of Grass, for inspiration. The radical, humanistic philosophy of Whitman’s verse held a particular appeal for Vaughan Williams. He had already produced some songs to Whitman texts when in 1903 he began to think about writing something on an altogether larger scale. First came Toward the Unknown Region (1907), also a setting of Whitman. Then in 1909, after a gestation of nearly six years, he completed ASea Symphony, the great choral and orchestral work which, more than any other, put Vaughan Williams firmly on the musical map when it was first performed in October 1910 (only a few weeks after his Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis). The Sea Symphony is a remarkable achievement. Vaughan Williams was not blessed with the natural talent of a Holst or