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Vaughan Williams: Sea Symphony
22 May 2008
Royal Festival Hall, London
“In tone colour and sensibility, Gerald Finley proved ideal casting as the baritone soloist. Whether puffed with pride over “sailors of all nations” or muted in contemplation, alone on the night beach, his voice radiated natural ease” The Times
"...a faultless Gerald Finley..." The Guardian
Susan Gritton, soprano
Gerald Finley, baritone
Richard Hickox, conductor
London Symphony Chorus
Philharmonia Orchestra
Vaughan Williams - Symphony No. 7: SinfoniaAntarctica
Vaughan Williams - Symphony No. 1: A Sea Symphony
Vaughan Williams' A Sea Symphony was his first significant large-scale work, using text from the American poet and humanist Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. The Sinfonia Antartica, composed over 50 years later, came about after Vaughan Williams had provided the soundtrack to Scott of the Antarctic, a film depicting the heroic age of exploration. This subject so inspired Vaughan Williams that he incorporated much of the evocative music into a symphony.
What the critics say
Colin Anderson, classicalsource.com, 23 May 2008 [Extracts]
http://www.classicalsource.com/db_control/db_concert_review.php?id=5880
The Philharmonia Orchestra is to be applauded for programming Ralph Vaughan Williams’s nine symphonies this year (as well as giving two performances of “The Pilgrim’s Progress”) to mark the 50th-anniversary of the composer’s death. In engaging Richard Hickox to conduct, a doughty Vaughan Williams champion has been chosen – he has previously conducted Vaughan Williams’s symphonies in London (with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra) and he has an-almost complete recorded survey of the canon on Chandos (with the London Symphony Orchestra). Hickox then is a (too?) familiar conductor of this repertoire…
…For the first of the four symphony concerts, it was “Vaughan Williams: The Elements”. It would perhaps have been interesting to have heard “A Sea Symphony” first, to launch the cycle in suitably seismic style (“Behold the sea…” – Walt Whitman) and then to have moved on to the wider palette of colours to be found in Sinfonia antartica (the misspelling is the composer’s!). But it was the Seventh Symphony the began the journey – arguably the weakest of VW’s nine, despite much that is striking, and not because it is derived from his score for “Scott of the Antarctic” (1948), the Ealing film’s cast including John Mills, James Robertson Justice and Kenneth More.
Potentially the music has the power to take us to a strange and forbidding landscape – this performance (however well-drilled and responsive) did not do so and rendered the music as intriguingly coloured but not necessarily as to why (the electronic organ, requiring stereophonic banks of speakers, fell short in terms of timbre in comparison with the still-not-fully-useable Festival Hall pipe instrument); nor was there much characterisation – so such moments as penguins waddling (second movement) lacked wit and, in the fourth, despite superb oboe and cor anglais solos, the occasional oasis of hope to stave-off ultimate tragedy lacked consolation given the play-down elsewhere of anything tangibly inhospitable. The off-stage soprano (Susan Gritton) and ladies’ voices (word-less) lacked mystery and threat and it wasn’t until the end that some unfriendly was felt, the wind-machine indicating that the elements take all before them. This was chilling.
It was just under two years ago that Richard Hickox conducted “A Sea Symphony” in London – with the same choir and soloists as here! – the basis of the Chandos recording. Of the two performances in this Philharmonia Orchestra concert, that of Symphony No.1 was the more engaging – even so it fell a little short of the incandescence and transcendence that accounts of this music can achieve.
Hickox certainly had an iron-grip on unifying the work (unlike in Sinfonia antartica), maybe too much so, for passages in the first movement were too gelling, what is effectively the trio of the third-movement scherzo was undersold in terms of expanse and lift, and the finale didn’t quite evoke oceanic distance and depths. That the performance was expertly marshalled and keenly detailed (there seemed to be a conscious reference by VW to Debussy’s La mer – in time-line terms it is possible) is not in doubt. Nor that the full-strength London Symphony Chorus (a group umbilically-tied to Hickox) was close to its considerable best, that the two soloists left little to be desired, and that the Philharmonia was exactingly responsive (Hickox appositely having the violins antiphonal and the double basses to the left) – but it was not the totally compelling experience it might have been.
Particularly memorable was the remarkably hushed string-playing that ended the second movement (‘On the Beach at Night, Alone’) and the pin-drop silence of the large audience in response; also the high-and-low fade to nothingness at the very end, echoes of the close of Richard Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra here, that cued an unfathomable vastness … cue Sinfonia antartica!
Geoff Brown, The Times, 27 May 2008
Rating: Four stars out of five
A pity, perhaps, that collective heads couldn't conjure up a better title than “Vaughan Williams: the Pioneering Pilgrim”. But anyone who loves Vaughan Williams, and those on the way to loving him, couldn't ask for a tastier concert series than the Philharmonia Orchestra's five-pack, spread throughout 2008, the 50th anniversary of the composer's death.
We began with the water symphonies: water frozen in Sinfonia Antartica, hewn from the film score for Scott of the Antarctic; water billowing into symbol and philosophy in A Sea Symphony, hewn from Walt Whitman. They made a great match.
Richard Hickox, conducting, couldn't prove that the Antarctic score pursues seamless symphonic logic, for it doesn't. But who could doubt the work's unity of geography and emotion? We were absolutely freezing. We were inches from death, fighting the gale from the wind machine. Wordless females (Susan Gritton and the LSO choir) wafted over the ice cliffs. Wordless penguins (that's the brass) waddled over the scherzo. I saw heroism, bravery, and failure. The Philharmonia, spick and span, revelled in every adventurous and glacial sonority; if you're hunting for cowpats in Vaughan Williams's music you won't find them here.
Forceful and visionary, the early choral Sea Symphony is another work to blow away clichés, especially when 193 voices of the London Symphony Chorus, salty and exultant, swell Whitman's “vastnesses of Space”. Vaughan Williams's structural engineering may be faulty at times (that epic last movement), but there were no power cuts, not from the composer, nor from the seafaring army on stage.
In tone colour and sensibility, Gerald Finley proved ideal casting as the baritone soloist. Whether puffed with pride over “sailors of all nations” or muted in contemplation, alone on the night beach, his voice radiated natural ease. Susan Gritton wasn't as snug a fit - declaiming, she pushed too hard - but I'd still be happy to sail with her and Finley to anywhere Vaughan Williams wanted to go.
Hickox's understanding and the Philharmonia's finesse worked really well together. Two more symphonies follow in the Philharmonia's next Vaughan Williams programme on May 31.
Guy Dammann, The Guardian,
28 May 2008
http://music.guardian.co.uk/classical/livereviews/story/0,,2282439,00.html
Rating: Four stars out of five
Neither symphony launching this series celebrating Vaughan Williams's 50th anniversary is performed often. The first, his setting of Walt Whitman's Song for All Seas, All Ships, demands a veritable navy of orchestral and choral resources, and the seventh, an expansion of the score of Scott of the Antarctic, is usually dismissed as an oddity, fraught with technical and artistic difficulty.
As an exploration of the awe and mystery of the natural world and of man's hubristic desire to master it, it is appropriate that the Sinfonia Antarctica threatens to spin out of control at every lurching turn - which made Hickox and the Philharmonia's restrained mastery of the score all the more remarkable. Never trying to squeeze order where none was to be found, nor over-egging Vaughan Williams's exotic pudding of percussive effect, wordless voices and Promethean collisions of timbre and tone, the inhuman landscape seemed powerfully present, penetrated only by the oboe homage to Captain Oates's last walk and the ethereal solo violin reverie in which his mortal breath ceases.
The Sea Symphony offers a more familiar vision of the composer, but despite a faultless Gerald Finley and a near-faultless Susan Gritton, impeccable performances by choir and orchestra, and all the Gerontian exuberance thrown at the score, the scent of imperial mothballs still clung. Indeed, while the symphony dazzled with its sheer force, what remained in the memory was the measured monumentalism of Whitman's proud elegy to the sea and its conquerors.
Ivan Hewett, The Telegraph, 2 June 2008
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2008/06/02/bmwilliams102.xml
If ever a composer deserved to be called the grand old man of English music it was surely Ralph Vaughan Williams, the 50th anniversary of whose death we're marking this year.
In the programme book for the Philharmonia's cycle of his nine symphonies, we see on almost every page a picture of him in old age, a craggy mountain of a man in a rumpled cardigan; just the sort you'd expect to write old-fashioned, very English music.
But what a different picture we're getting from the music itself, so full of visionary splendour and transcendence, but also an unillusioned bleakness and at times an anxiety that sounds very modern.
This series has been devised by Michael Kennedy, a former distinguished editor and writer for this newspaper, and author of a fine study of Vaughan Williams's music. The second of these two concerts gave us the late 8th Symphony, and the London Symphony, written 40 years earlier.
In between came The Lark Ascending, the violin's lovely rhapsodic ascent rendered with perfect poise and grace by Anthony Marwood.
The perfect proportions of that piece made the rambling quality of many passages in the London Symphony - here being performed in its original 1914 version - seem all the more self-indulgent.
The composer himself would surely have agreed, which is why he made the revised version of the symphony we all know. The original version is interesting for Vaughan Williams's aficionados, but putting it in a high-profile series gives it a stamp of authority that it really doesn't deserve.
That aside, these concerts were a joy, especially the first. Conductor Richard Hickox has an instinctive command of VW's idiom, and knows how far pastoral spaciousness can bend the music's pulse without sounding indulgent.
The last movement of the Sea Symphony, often decried as shapeless, seemed as shrewdly structured and paced in this performance as anything in Mahler.
The London Symphony Chorus were on marvellous form, and baritone Gerald Finley made Walt Whitman's ecstatic invitations to his soul to "sail farther" seem emotionally true.
But the real revelation was the Sinfonia Antarctica. I've never been so keenly aware of the way this piece presents two starkly opposed worlds: the human world of stoic endurance and fortitude, and the Antarctic landscape, so alien and bleak that it could be some other planet.