A wave of sound and poetry will flood the Kodak Hall stage during a free public performance this Friday, April 28. Ralph Vaughan Williams’s first composition, which he called “A Sea Symphony,” is not only the longest of this British composer’s nine symphonies; it is one of the most exhilarating works in the choral-orchestral repertory.
Conducted by William Weinert, the Eastman-Rochester Chorus and Eastman Philharmonia will collaborate to present Vaughan Williams’ “A Sea Symphony” at 7:30 p.m. in Kodak Hall. It is Weinert’s fourth presentation of this massive work at Eastman.
“I love coming back to it,” he says. Weinert is grateful that many Rochester choral singers also came back to it after several years of COVID-19 fears and restrictions. There will be 160 singers in this concert, plus two Eastman student vocal soloists — baritone S Joshua Sheppard and soprano Sofia Scattarreggia — and the Eastman Philharmonia, totaling more than 200 musicians.
Ralph Vaughan Williams once described himself as “a cheerful agnostic,” though he was respectful of religious traditions and community; he wrote a mass, a magnificat, anthems, and other beautiful works with explicitly liturgical texts. However, “A Sea Symphony,” which premiered in 1910 when Vaughan Williams was 37 years old, isn’t one of them.
That is because the text is taken from Walt Whitman. The great American poet and the young British composer were a perfect fit: both deeply spiritual thinkers, as well as what used to be called “freethinkers,” skeptical of organized religion. Vaughan Williams chose several passages from Whitman comparing our journey through life (and beyond) to a long, eventful sea voyage to an unknown region. The last words “O my brave soul! O farther, farther sail!” are set to music that can be described as visionary.
“’A Sea Symphony’ is one of the very few big choral works that is not specifically Christian, in fact not liturgical at all,” says Weinert. “‘God’ is mentioned a few times, but Whitman’s God is not exactly the God I learned about in Sunday School.”
Nor is it a picture of the sea.
“It presents the sea as spiritual, philosophic, transcendental,” says Weinert. “In the first movement, we set out on the sea; in the second, the individual confronts the infinite; by the end of the last movement, we’re headed into completely unknown regions.”
Inspired by Whitman’s powerful verse, Vaughan Williams produced music to rival the sea itself; the sounds and textures are constantly changing in the chorus and in the orchestra.
“From sopranos to basses, there is a tremendous variety of musical forces, moods, and tempos,” says Weinert. “I’ve counted 37 different tempos in the first movement alone. He is a master at building a climax, gradually receding, and then rebuilding.“
This article appears in Apr 1-30, 2023.
