Our third performance of the Sea Symphony was at St David’s Hall in Cardiff. I hope our diction came over well because the audience (who’d chosen us in preference to Ireland v Wales in the rugby) weren’t able to get programmes. Here are some thoughts on the actual music.
The programme was the same for each of the three concerts. Firstly the Wasps overture, composed for a performance of Aristophanes’ play in Cambridge. I’ve been to a few Cambridge Greek plays, and while the incidental music for them has usually done the job, the days when a major composer might write it are long gone. Did the Classical Drama Society use up a large chunk of their budget commissioning a score from VW? Or was this particular play very lavishly funded? Or did Vaughan Williams charge students a reduced fee? I do wonder whether the overture was already written or thought out, and when the commission arrived the ‘buzzing’ introduction was added, because the overture’s wasps are much less persistent than real ones and you don’t hear them afterwards.
Mark van de Wiel was the in-house soloist in Finzi’s Clarinet Concerto with the Philharmonia string section. I didn’t know this piece and like much of Finzi it had considerably more drama and darkness than he’s usually given credit for, at least in the first two movements. I’m not sure whether I was meant to think this, but some of the strings-only passages reminded me of Shostakovich!
Having got to know it, I still have rather mixed feelings about the Sea Symphony. The second movement is sublime, with a grand summing up near the end (I was reminded of Vaughan Williams’ anthem Lord, Thou hast been our refuge). But I find the first and last movements a bit diffuse. Maybe the problem is that I’m very unfamiliar with Vaughan Williams’ orchestral works and haven’t worked out yet how to listen to them. I was one of the semi-chorus (which sang two phrases in the 4th movement) in the Cardiff and Basingstoke performances (what was it with VW and groups of 16 singers?).