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Symphony No.1 'A Sea Symphony'
Ralph Vaughan Williams
In 1910
Ralph Vaughan Williams presented his first large-scale choral-orchestral
work, A Sea Symphony. It premiered
at the Leeds Festival in October of that year on his 38th birthday
in a performance produced by Charles Villiers Stanford, Vaughan
Williams himself conducting the performance. Whereas
his Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis presented in
the same year was
reflective and ethereal, A
Sea Symphony was
extrovert, outdoor and very much of the real world.
The text
comes
from the poem Leaves of Grass by
Walt Whitman whose use of free verse rather than traditional metric
verse appealed
to Vaughan Williams’ desire to have a text that ebbed and
flowed like the sea.
[www.rvwsociety.com] |
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 Songs
of the Fleet
Charles Villiers Stanford
Charles Villiers Stanford was a dynamic Irish
composer, conductor and teacher, counting Ralph Vaughan Williams
amongst his pupils at the Royal College in London. His compositions
are as varied as they are numerous,
but he is best remembered for his church music and fine
songs. Henry Plunkett-Green (an early interpreter of the
songs) described as their chief qualities their "lilt,
rhythm, sense of words, sense of atmosphere, musical imagery and
illustration,
directness
of purpose and – guiding them all – imagination, humour
and economy".
The Songs of the Fleet, with poems by Sir Henry Newbolt,
were first performed and conducted by Stanford at the same
1910 Leeds Festival which premiered Vaughan Williams' A Sea
Symphony.
[en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Villiers_Stanford]
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