A Sea Symphony – Vaughan Williams

Camden Choir

We will be joining forces with the Bromley Adult Choir and the Green Street Green Singers to perform Vaughan Williams’ epic Sea Symphony at the end of November. The words of the symphony, first performed in 1910, are by the American poet Walt Whitman (1819–92), to whose work the composer was introduced by his teacher Charles Villiers Stanford. Vaughan Williams was 35 years old when he started work on the Sea Symphony (the first of nine) and it took him seven years to complete. Its famous opening, with a brass fanfare and the choir declaiming Behold The Sea, sets the tone. There are four contrasting movements, with solo passages for soprano and baritone.

Our soloists will be Lesley-Jane Rogers (an old friend of the choir) and Grant Doyle, who recently appeared at the Royal Albert Hall in a performance of Orff’s Carmina Burana. We are delighted to welcome the London City Orchestra, with whom we collaborated in 2016. They will complete the concert’s nautical theme by performing Wagner’s Overture to The Flying Dutchman (1843) and Sibelius’s tone poem The Oceanides (Nymphs of the Waves), premiered in 1914.