St George's Singers

For their final concert of this season St George’s Singers will once more join forces with Stockport Symphony Orchestra, this time to present Vaughan Williams A Sea Symphony.

This dramatic work is Ralph Vaughan Williams’s first symphony, written between 1903 and 1909, and his first major large-scale work. In preparing to write it he studied the works of Elgar and particularly The Enigma Variations, and The Dream of Gerontius which SGS and SSO performed together last year. A Sea Symphony was one of the first symphonies to use the chorus as an integral part of the musical.

In its four movements: A Song for all Seas, all Ships; On the Beach at Night Alone; The Waves; and The Explorers, A Sea Symphony paints a vivid musical picture of the sea in all its moods from fearsome waves to gentle lapping ripples on the shore.

The text is taken from Leaves of Grass by American poet, Walt Whitman, whose verse attracted Vaughan Williams for its vision of a world inspired by human and scientific endeavour and the spirit of adventure.