The magnificent, sea-farin’ A Sea Symphony is the sort of choral rarity that the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Chorus were born to deliver. Ralph Vaughan Williams, an English composer drawn to bold gestures and bucolic simplicity, set poetry by the rough and boundless Walt Whitman, a perpetual free agent of the American language, an echt-American artist. The choral symphony is at turns thrilling, deeply moving and slightly monstrous — and glorious to hear in concert.
The scheduled conductor for this week was Nicholas Carter, a Brit and the unfortunate victim of ever-increasing visa complications — thanks to on-going pandemic restrictions and to the self-sabotaging policies of Brexit. But the ASO Chorus had been rehearsing A Sea Symphony for weeks; the last-minute podium substitute needed to have the complex, 65-minute piece at the ready.
For the performance Thursday in Symphony Hall, they had found a very worthy replacement in Michael Francis, who is also British but has steady U.S. jobs: he’s music director of the Florida Orchestra in Tampa and the Mainly Mozart Festival in San Diego.
A Vaughan Williams specialist, Francis had A Sea Symphony ready and agreed to conduct the whole program as scheduled. He had the full week’s calendar of rehearsals, too, which meant that what we heard was thoroughly his interpretation. (Francis made his ASO debut in 2017 at Symphony Hall, for a concert that included Vaughan Williams’ Fifth Symphony.)
They opened the evening with a tremendous piece by Lera Auerbach, born in 1973 and trained in her native Soviet Union. Her music is now performed all over.
“As a child, I lived in ancient Greece,” the composer writes about her 13-minute Icarus, from 2011. Her brief, brilliant composer’s note explores the mythology and psychology of the boy who flew too close to the sun and the father who created those wings — his greatest invention was also his greatest failure. But then, in a bait-n-switch, Auerbach admits that her music is abstract and that she only picked a title after the music was written.
Nevermind the title. Her voice is sophisticated and she uses the full orchestra to colorful effect, often with the subtle echoes and specificity of countrymen Shostakovich and Schnittke. As is fashionable today, the piece opens with a bang, of scurrying strings and big brass declarations, punctuated by tubular bells — a series of powerful surges that grab everyone’s attention. After a few minutes she brings it all to a halt and transitions into a new, contemplative mood, with David Coucheron’s solo violin and Daniel Laufer’s solo cello over two harps. It’s a dreamscape to end the first section.
The second part is menacing, with growling, ominous low strings and blaring brass. Out of this anxious scene rises the unique voice of the theremin, played by Arturo Fernandez, although he’s uncredited in the program. Once the standard for sci-fi TV and in films like Hitchcock’s Spellbound, the theremin relies on electromagnetic waves — not the human touch — for pitch and volume. The thereminist moves their hands around the instrument’s antennae to alter the sounds, even wiggling fingers for vibrato and trills. (Fernandez performed on an instrument made by Moog called the Claravox Centennial.)
The theremin creates an eerie, outer-spacey atmosphere, and Auerbach had us thinking the work explored facets of the subconscious. The music builds to an unbearable tension, with the bells now ringing for our imminent doom. Then the theremin’s pitches drop, drop, drop, right through the floor, and a new mood is created, cute and a little mechanical, like pirouetting wind-up dolls, leading to a long, slow fade-out. The ASO has a facility with complicated contemporary music, even when it gets gnarly, and conductor Francis kept the whole thing poised and expressive.
The orchestral excerpts from Wagner’s opera Götterdämmerung, “Dawn and Siegfried’s Rhine Journey” — what George Bernard Shaw termed “bleeding chunks” from the Ring cycle — were rough at the start, with the horns poorly balanced and a general haze over the ensemble. But when the strings entered, silken and wonderful, it all started to come together. Francis gave the Rhine journey section a playful bounce: Adventure! See the world! What could possibly go wrong?! (Spoiler alert: It’s the end of the world as we know it.)
After intermission, they returned for the Vaughan Williams. As Francis mentioned in his spoken program notes, the sea can be seen as a metaphor for life, for our journey through it, and as a cry for unity. There’s a lot of text to get through, and Francis’ often quick tempos ran the risk of blurring the words or not providing adequate breathing room for expression. Thanks to ASO chorus director Norman Mackenzie’s disciplined preparation, and to the operatic skills of the two vocal soloists — and not least the ASO’s virtuosity — this fear almost never materialized, and when it did there were unexpected new insights to be gleaned.
The opening movement uses a Whitman title, “A Song for All Seas, All Ships.” It starts with a punchy brass fanfare, then the chorus shouts at ecstatic full volume: “Behold! THE SEA!” For the next hour-plus you’re pinned to the back of your seat.
Still finding his mature voice, Vaughan Williams finished this, his first symphony, in 1909. Yet when you hear A Sea Symphony, you’re struck by how the natural world isn’t really part of it. The composer knew the watery sounds from Wagner’s Das Rheingold and derivative depictions such as Smetana’s The Moldau. He likely knew Debussy’s Impressionistic seascape La Mer, with imagery that would have been hard to resist.
But Vaughan Williams took his own path, and despite mentions of ships and waves and the sounds and dangers of life at sea, this choral symphony isn’t about a romanticized notion of the watery part of the world but, rather, about mankind seeking transcendence in a setting which you can’t control. In this often very loud reading, the chorus itself seemed to represent the sea, the unstoppable force of nature. Everyone else had to shout to be heard over the raging ocean.
So much of that is, in fact, built into the score. Even in moments where you’d expect tranquility, the composer can’t hold back. Heroic baritone Lucas Meachem begins the second movement, “On the Beach at Night Alone,” with depictions of a mother singing to her baby and the bright night stars overhead and “I think a thought on the clef of the universes and of the future.” Whitman’s irregular pacing gets smoothed in the composer’s setting, but it’s the chorus accompanying the solo singer, or on their own, that makes the most impact.
Soprano Nicole Cabell was singing gorgeously, as ever, and her voice has darkened over the years, with added texture. Her singing, especially in the final section, “The Explorers,” offered a maternal richness.
In 2001, just after the 9/11 attacks, the ASO performed and recorded A Sea Symphony — one of the ASO’s finest achievements from the Robert Spano era. They returned to this rarity in 2016. Thursday’s performance held some incredibly beautiful singing, to be sure, but lacked nuance and a certain warmth and spirituality we expect from hearing past ASO performances. The choral effect was a velvet-covered battering ram. With this last-minute invitation, Francis might have felt he’d been given keys to a Ferrari, and while exulting in its power and nimbleness, hadn’t perfectly mastered how to steer the thing.
At evening’s end, after the last, serene notes of A Sea Symphony ebbed away, the solo singers and chorus master Mackenzie took the stage for the audiences’ hearty applause. Mackenzie first pointed to chorister Jeffrey Baxter, a tenor who’s retiring as the ASOC’s choral administrator.
As the rest of the all-volunteer choir cheered, Baxter stood, put hand to heart, and appeared to be crying: he’s been involved with the ensemble, as a singer and manager, some 40 years, since the Robert Shaw era. Perhaps now Baxter can travel the world, or write with insight about Bach, or practice his Esperanto.
This excellent program, well worth the ticket, repeats Saturday at 8 p.m.
::
Pierre Ruhe was the founding executive director and editor of ArtsATL. He’s been a critic and cultural reporter for the Washington Post, London’s Financial Times and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and was director of artistic planning for the Alabama Symphony Orchestra. He is publications director of Early Music America.
