Dartington Community Choir Spring Concert

Dartington Community Choir proudly presents the celebrated baritone Roderick Williams singing Vaughan Williams’ dramatic “A Sea Symphony” and Stanford’s “Songs of the Fleet” with the choir, soprano Catherine Hamilton and the Dartington Sinfonietta.

Simon Capet, the choir’s conductor and director of music, has chosen the choir’s dramatic concert programme to resonate with the Mayflower 400 commemorations. Forceful and emotional, “A Sea Symphony” of 1909 is set to verses by Walt Whitman and evokes courageous sailors exploring vast oceans, through all their immense dangers and beauties, as a metaphor for the individual soul’s journey through life – much like the Pilgrim Fathers’. With bold, energetic and vivid orchestration, Vaughan Williams sought to capture the essence of the new 20th century before World War 1: its optimism, its new science and its sense of adventure.

The programme will also include Charles Stanford’s “Songs of the Fleet” of 1910; like “A Sea Symphony”, these five songs set to the poems of Sir Henry Newbolt are a celebration of the sea and the profound demands it makes on those who confront it with their hopes.