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Vaughan Williams: A Sea Symphony
Friday 23 May 2008, 7:30pm
De Montfort Hall, Leicester
Richard Hickox, conductor
Alina Ibragimova, violin
Susan Gritton, soprano
Gerald Finley, baritone
London Symphony Chorus
Mendelssohn: Hebrides Overture
Bruch: Violin Concerto No. 1
Vaughan Williams: Symphony No. 1, A Sea Symphony
This concert forms part of the Philharmonia’s major celebration, with Richard Hickox, to mark the 50th Anniversary of Vaughan Williams’s death. Originally titled The Ocean, A Sea Symphony was Vaughan Williams’s first significant large-scale work, employing vast orchestral forces, chorus and soloists, premiered in 1910 at the Leeds Festival. The text, from the American poet and humanist Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, was attractive to Vaughan Williams as its free verse allowed for a similarly fluid compositional structure, and the work is one of many sea-related pieces written around that time in England, including Elgar’s Sea Pictures and Bridge’s The Sea, while Debussy’s La mer may also have influenced this nautical fascination.