Vaughan Williams’s Sea Symphony and The Wasps

19 November 2022

The Salisbury Musical Society’s Autumn Concert took place in the Cathedral on Saturday, November 19th, conducted by David Halls. The programme was chosen to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Ralph Vaughan Williams’ birth. The choir were pleased once again to welcome the Chelsea Opera Group Orchestra. The concert was dedicated to the memory of the late Dr. Richard Seal, the choir’s conductor for nearly thirty years. He would have been delighted with it.
The concert opened with Vaughan Williams’ Overture, The Wasps. Although the Overture is quite well known, the Suite from which it comes is something of a rarity, being one of only three pieces of incidental music which RVW wrote, and one of very few works recorded with RVW himself conducting his own music. The wasps depicted in the opening bars disappear after a short while, and the rest of the Overture is pure Vaughan Williams orchestral music. It is hard to detect the alleged influence of Ravel in the work, but Vaughan Williams’ interest in pastoral effects and folk song is clear. The orchestra played superbly; the first appearance of the big tune which holds the work together was beautifully suave and legato, and the lighter central section an excellent contrast, before the final big three chords.
The words of the Sea Symphony, by the American poet Walt Whitman, are graphic, and cry out to be set to music. RVW was well up to the job, a master of orchestration, able to depict both grandeur and peace. Accordingly, the work is a favourite of many singers.
When I first saw the choir of fewer than 100 people sitting behind the orchestra of about seventy, I was worried about balance. Balance can be a problem in choral works of the late 19th/early 20th centuries. After the opening fanfare, how would the choir cope? Excellently. They gave as good as they got, on Page 1. Ensemble was excellent throughout; in gentler passages such as “and out of these a chant for the sailors of all nations” both balance and diction were ideal. I could hear perfectly clearly where the “s” came in the altered passage, “my thought begins to span thee”. In those places where conductors mark a breath, for effect, it was beautifully tidy, such as, “Flaunt out/ Visible as ever.” There were, frankly, a few places later in the work where I could barely hear the choir at all. I was amused to see, at one place in my second-hand copy, “turn quietly”; I don’t think the odd rustle would have mattered.
Entries were mostly good. They were certainly well-prepared, and therefore on time. There were occasions when the entry is a short note, which got lost. It would be good to place some extra emphasis on such notes, even if it sounds a bit peculiar in the choir. Quavers matter. The altos occasionally sounded as if they needed a leader to guide their attack, but their entry at “token of all brave captains” was beautiful. The tenor department is obviously a bit short-staffed (how I wish I could go back and help out!) but they did valiantly, and when it was essential that they should be clearly heard, they were. When they “steered for the deep waters only”, all by themselves, they achieved the clear pianissimo which I missed elsewhere.
I sometimes long for some really quiet singing from the SMS, especially the sopranos. When orchestration permits, some really quiet, but still focussed, singing would sound magical in the setting of the Cathedral, in the evening light. In the third movement we got larger and smaller waves, but what happened to the “f>p” on foam, or the sudden drop from ff to pp after “O thou transcendent”? If they sang quietly sometimes, they could then keep a spare 5 per cent for the really big climaxes. The loud passages in The Sea Symphony are truly exciting, and the SMS made them so, but the quiet, mysterioso sections are so beautiful. “On the beach at night alone” is surely one of the most evocative titles in all music. Dominic Sedgwick and the altos clearly felt a little bit of a shiver.
There are only two soloists in the Sea Symphony, who are not required to take quite such a prominent role in this work as in some others, but they were ideally suited to their parts. Dominic Sedgwick and Eleanor Dennis responded to the work’s sometimes considerable demands faultlessly.
The clarity of Mr. Sedgwick’s diction was amazing. Ms. Dennis was quite up to eclipsing the orchestra in even the most exposed places. She “chanted her chant of pleasant exploration” right up to a radiant B.
This was a most enjoyable concert; no concert can achieve perfection, and any criticisms are intended to be friendly and constructive. I wish the SMS, of which I was a member for fifty years, every success in their centenary year and beyond.

Malcolm Sturgess
Reviewer