A Sea Symphony

The excitement and glory of performing Haydn's The Creation is now behind us and our thoughts and musical attention is turned towards Vaughan Williams's A Sea Symphony. City Choir Dunedin will fly up to Auckland to join the Auckland Choral Society and the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra for a performance of A Sea Symphony in the Auckland Town Hall on Saturday 15 November.

We hope to bring this work to a Dunedin concert hall near you with the Southern Sinfonia in 2015. Fingers crossed that we can get all the stars aligned to make it happen!

Written between 1903 and 1909, Vaughan Williams's first and longest symphony, it was first performed at the Leeds Festival in 1910, with the composer conducting. The symphony's maturity belies the composer's relative youth when it was written (he was 30 when he first began sketching it). As one of the first symphonies in which a choir is used throughout as an integral part of the musical texture, A Sea Symphony helped set the stage for a new era of symphonic and choral music in England during the first half of the 20th century.

The text of A Sea Symphony comes from Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass.


I. A Song for All Seas, All Ships
II. (20:10) On the Beach at Night Alone
III. (32:09) Scherzo: The Waves
IV. (40:22) The Explorers

Sakari Oramo conducts the BBC Symphony Orchestra, BBC Symphony Chorus, BBC Proms Youth Choir and soloists Sally Matthews and Roderick Williams

Divine performance, thunderous applause

Haydn's The Creation, NZSO and City Choir Dunedin, 3 September 2014, Dunedin Town Hall

Haydn’s The Creation presents a journey through a fantastic wonderland where man presides over an infinitely bountiful natural world, where love and luxury prevail equitably. It celebrates a miraculous creation devoid of lurking snakes and leaves the listener replete with unworldly exaltation.

In the Dunedin Town Hall, it was divinely performed to a full house by the NZSO, the City Choir Dunedin and soloists soprano Madeleine Pierard, tenor Robin Tritschler and bass Jonathan Lemalu under the inspired direction of Nicholas McGegan.

Although the choir’s part-singing sounded a little muddied at times when concentration was required, overall their sound was cohesive, dedicated and articulate with strong entries.

The solo voices melded beautifully together. All showed tremendous strength in softer passages with Lemalu’s tender tones being particularly pleasing.

Pierard was also notable for her delicacy and agility throughout her range. Their duet as Adam and Eve became as tender a love song as an oratorio can properly allow, enriched with the best of human quality. Tritschler’s tenor was clear with rich finesse.

The work rises gracefully, yet with great moment, out of silence. It relates the creation of life which, banishing gloom, evolves over the mythical seven days, divided into two parts, with a third devoted to Adam and Eve in Eden, to bloom with the simple rapture, joyful bliss, that the natural world inspires.

The playful word painting of water, birds, roaring lions and sinuous tigers were mostly successful.

While Lemalu’s depiction of lowly insects drew a laugh from the audience, the farmyard sounds of chickens and cattle failed to make their wit resound.

Although this long work sometimes tests the audience’s power of concentration, this performance was rewarded with thunderous stamping and prolonged applause. Contemporary cynicism was banished for the night.

Bravo.

Reviewed for the Otago Daily Times by Marian Poole, 4 September 2014.