Vaughan Williams: A Sea Symphony – Maconchy: Nocturne for Orchestra

Sir Antonio Pappano leads the London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus in Vaughan Williams’s first symphony, a vast choral setting of Walt Whitman’s sea poetry. Vaughan Williams conducted the premiere at the 1910 Leeds Festival on his 38th birthday, and the work builds a symphony out of words as well as music. Two themes recur through all four movements, one for the opening line “Behold, the sea itself” and one for the ships on its “limitless, heaving breast.” The movements range from the baritone nocturne “On the beach at night alone” to a choral tour de force in the Scherzo, and the finale, which owes a debt to Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius, closes in an ecstatic duet and a fade into silence.

This recording uses David Matthews’s new 2025 edition from Stainer & Bell, which publishes Vaughan Williams’s 1945 revisions for the first time. They include trombones replacing horns in the opening two bars and an organ part in the Scherzo. Elizabeth Maconchy’s Nocturne for Orchestra (1950), prefaced in the score by a Coleridge passage on the “journeying Moon,” makes a luminous coupling. It is a moonlit night piece with an uneasy undertow, glistening harp and celeste, and a serene close. The recording was supported by the ABO Trust’s Sirens Fund, which promotes music by historical women composers. Captured live at the Barbican Hall in DSD 256fs, it brings out the full scale of the choir and orchestra.

London Symphony Orchestra
London Symphony Chorus
Sir Antonio Pappano, conductor
Masabane Cecilia Rangwanasha, soprano
Will Liverman, baritone