Sunday 6th November 2022
City of Birmingham
Choir & CBSO
Symphony Hall ****
The arresting
opening fanfare of Ralph Vaughan Williams’ A
Sea Symphony (1910) announces not only the vast ocean (“Behold, the sea
itself”) but arguably the arrival of this much-loved of English composers onto
the world’s stage, since this was the ‘late-to-bloom’ composer’s breakthrough
work.
And the City
of Birmingham Choir can claim a special connection given that Vaughan Williams himself
conducted them in a performance of the symphony, again with the CBSO, at
Birmingham Town Hall, in 1955. This no doubt provided some additional
motivation since the choir were on fine form here, with strongly projected
diction in the opening movement’s joyous depiction of ships and sailors,
appropriately ‘fleet of foot’ in the scherzo, but with a consistently sweet,
blended tone in the more lyrical passages throughout.
Balance is
often a problem in this extensive musical canvas, and the singers occasionally
became submerged in the fuller tutti sections, but nonetheless they
heroically made their mark, their commitment never in doubt.
Baritone
Benson Wilson could perhaps have had more projection in passages where he sang
alone, but his warm-toned voice was well matched with Soprano Alexandra Lowe,
both soloists effortlessly floating their intertwined lines with a luminosity
that was spell-binding in the symphony’s expansive final movement, The Explorers.
The CBSO
captured the full colour gamut of Vaughan Williams’ rich orchestration, from
the tidal ebb and flow in the strings, the sailors’ spirited sea shanties in
the woodwind, to the inky blackness of the “Beach at Night, Alone” (second
movement) in the lower brass.
The symphony
was given an assured, expansive reading by conductor Adrian Lucas – never
overblown, although I would have welcomed a slightly less reserved approach to some
of the more climactic moments. Fittingly, in his speech from the podium, Lucas
looked to the future, referencing “the City Choir’s first century of music” in
this, their Centenary Year, just as Walt Whitman’s poetry on which the symphony
is based finishes with the voyage to come.
The RVW ‘hors
d’oeuvres’ served up in the first half were the Benedicite (1929) and the evergreen Fantasia on Greensleeves (1934), the former suitably dignified, the
latter delivered with warm viola tone and idiomatic flute & harp.
Anthony Bradbury