By Lawrence Toppman
The Charlotte Symphony Orchestra’s (CSO) concert Saturday was designed to appeal to Anglophiles, fans of massive choral pieces, people who welcomed the return of former music director Christopher Warren-Green to the podium, advocates for obscure female composers and anyone who grew up within a short drive of an ocean. I fit into all five categories, so I blissed out.
Warren-Green chose never to address the audience for the first time I can remember. He husbanded his energy for the last piece, Ralph Vaughan Williams’ majestic but unrelenting “A Sea Symphony,” which takes an hour and requires two soloists, a full orchestra and a large chorus. (Kenney Potter did his usual first-rate job preparing the Charlotte Master Chorale.)
That propulsive performance capped an all-oceanic evening, following Benjamin Britten’s “Four Sea Interludes” from the opera “Peter Grimes” and Grace Williams’ “Sea Sketches: Five Pieces for String Orchestra.” All three composers on this program wrote film scores – Williams became the first British woman to score a feature in 1949, with “Blue Scar” – and it’s no insult to say that moments of each piece sounded cinematic, summoning images of waters wild or tame.
The conductor laureate went right for maximum drama in Britten, where elements of menace and melancholy seemed portents for the massive storm with which “Sea Interludes” ends. The ferocity of that tempest has almost no parallels in Britten’s orchestral work, and the CSO rocked it like a hurricane.
Williams’ quintet of sketches provided a change of view: She saw the sea from Glamorgan in Wales. As far as I know, she never left the British Isles, and I couldn’t help hearing the wistfulness of someone who longed for distant ports but wouldn’t get there. Even “Sailing Song,” whose title suggested a buoyant ditty, had a gentle restlessness. She reserved the most beautiful melody for the final sketch, “Calm Sea in Summer.” But as any sailor knows, being “becalmed” means you’re going nowhere, and the feeling was not entirely peaceful.
Vaughan Williams, who taught Grace Williams at the Royal College of Music, pulled out all the vocal stops for his first symphony. (He was also one of the examiners who awarded Britten a scholarship to the RCM, though he didn’t teach the lad.) Vaughan Williams became devoted to American poet Walt Whitman in his 30s and matched epic music to Whitman’s equally expansive texts.
The soloists’ roles reverse expectations: The baritone gets the introspective music, while the soprano has soaring phrases that ride out over the orchestra. Andrew Foster-Williams provided the more intense emotions, Georgia Jarman the grand declamations.
Yet the chorus remains the focus. Vaughan Williams begins with a tremendous vocal and orchestral crash – “Behold the sea itself!” — and ends with a whisper, as mighty waters ebb away. The chorus has to rise and fall constantly, singing with fervor at all times, and the Charlotte Master Chorale (which collectively had diction as good as the soloists’) held firm.
Vaughan Williams didn’t write many catchy tunes in “A Sea Symphony;” the one with immediate appeal sounds like an Anglican hymn. (He wrote those, too.) Like Whitman, who broke with conventions about rhyme and meter, he wanted simply to create a mood that rolled over us like a great wave. In the hands of these musicians, it did.
Pictured: Conductor Laureate Christopher Warren-Green; Courtesy Charlotte Symphony.