![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
This year is the centenary of the completion of the composition of A Sea Symphony by Ralph Vaughan Williams, one of my favorite large choral compositions, so it's appropriate that I should get a rare chance to hear it live - I'd only done so once before, years ago at a VW festival in London.
This was a one-shot performance done by well-intentioned local amateurs in the San Jose cathedral, a beautiful building with, regrettably, the acoustics of a walk-in icebox (which in winter it sometimes resembles in temperature as well). I went here to hear the music despite, not because of, the venue.
Fortunately A Sea Symphony is a hugely extroverted, grandiose work integrating the chorus with the orchestra, so if anything can survive being soldered together into a mass of sound, this can, which is good because it had to. Aimée Puentes, whom I've heard before in A Child of Our Time, is a soprano soloist with a powerful voice, but she had to work to be heard in the louder regions; baritone Peter Tuff had a somewhat easier time of it.
Both soloists were fine and expressive. So far as I could hear the details, the orchestra and chorus held up fairly well, not too much out of tune. Even in hard parts or the anxious spot where he inadvertently turned three pages of the score at once, Leroy Kromm, who conducts as if he were sending semaphore signals, kept the music together, though I missed some of the sense of the over-riding scope and shape which is necessary for a successful performance of this large-scale work. The scherzo was by far the best movement in this regard.
The one thing I wish to say about the pre-concert lecturer is that he ought to have, on his forehead or some other spot he can easily see, tattooed - or inscribed with a wood-burning set, which would probably be more appropriate - the words "It's pronounced 'Rafe'. Got it?"
This was a one-shot performance done by well-intentioned local amateurs in the San Jose cathedral, a beautiful building with, regrettably, the acoustics of a walk-in icebox (which in winter it sometimes resembles in temperature as well). I went here to hear the music despite, not because of, the venue.
Fortunately A Sea Symphony is a hugely extroverted, grandiose work integrating the chorus with the orchestra, so if anything can survive being soldered together into a mass of sound, this can, which is good because it had to. Aimée Puentes, whom I've heard before in A Child of Our Time, is a soprano soloist with a powerful voice, but she had to work to be heard in the louder regions; baritone Peter Tuff had a somewhat easier time of it.
Both soloists were fine and expressive. So far as I could hear the details, the orchestra and chorus held up fairly well, not too much out of tune. Even in hard parts or the anxious spot where he inadvertently turned three pages of the score at once, Leroy Kromm, who conducts as if he were sending semaphore signals, kept the music together, though I missed some of the sense of the over-riding scope and shape which is necessary for a successful performance of this large-scale work. The scherzo was by far the best movement in this regard.
The one thing I wish to say about the pre-concert lecturer is that he ought to have, on his forehead or some other spot he can easily see, tattooed - or inscribed with a wood-burning set, which would probably be more appropriate - the words "It's pronounced 'Rafe'. Got it?"
