7.45pm
"Seascapes"
Festival Chorus
Philharmonia Orchestra
Conducted by Martyn Brabbins
Worcester Cathedral

Financial assistance received from The Elmley Foundation

Messiaen - Les offrandes oubilées
Britten - Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes
Vaughan Williams - Sea Symphony

Paula Greenwood (soprano)
William Clements (Baritone)

The prevailing image of Messiaen is of an organist-composer yet he was among the most influential figures in the music of the twentieth century. The orchestral version of Les offrandes oubliées was completed in 1930, with an alternative piano version as the composer's first ‘public' work. He had recently been appointed as the youngest ever organist at the church of La Trinité in Paris. It reveals his faith explicitly and is structured as three short movements representing ‘The Cross', ‘The descent of Man into Sin' and ‘The offer of salvation through the Eucharist'.

Peter Grimes marked a watershed in Britten's career, and a rebirth for British opera. There are three main protagonists in this opera - the schizophrenic Grimes himself (so divided, he is almost two characters), the force of public opinion (represented by the chorus), and the enveloping world in which the drama unfolds. This last is represented by the orchestra, and the Sea Interludes are not just scene painting in sound but are an essential part of the flow of the drama. There are actually six in the opera, of which he took four to form this separate concert work. Peter Grimes was Britten's coming of age, being written during the later years of the Second World War (1943-44) when he was 30, and it exploded onto the musical scene of tired, drab, post-war England. Grimes is a tortured soul, divided both against himself and against society. The two combine fatally, and his destruction becomes assured.

Vaughan Williams' Sea Symphony, one of his earliest works, was inspired by the verse of Walt Whitman and influenced by the work of Elgar. No musical dictionary or encyclopedia contains an entry on Walt Whitman. Surely there ought to be room for the great American poet that an earlier generation of British composers, among them Stanford, Charles Wood, Harty, HoIst, Delius and Vaughan Williams, seized on? Vaughan Williams regarded Whitman as one of the greatest men of his lifetime. He first set his poetry to music in 1903 when he began to sketch what he called his Songs of the Sea, which then became The Ocean Symphony and finally A Sea Symphony. This ambitious choral work was to occupy Vaughan Williams for six years and the four movements draw on Whitman's poetry to illustrate both the natural majesty and splendour of the sea itself (in the Scherzo especially) and the sea as metaphoric setting for the soul of man's voyage into eternity.