Postponed : A Sea Symphony | Dartington Sinfonietta

Dartington Community Choir proudly presents the celebrated baritone Roderick Williams singing Ralph Vaughan Williams’s dramatic 1909 A Sea Symphony with soprano Catherine Hamilton and the Dartington Sinfonietta, to resonate with the Mayflower 400 commemorations. Forceful and emotional, this work set to verses by Walt Whitman 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.

Simon Capet, the choir’s conductor and director of music has also chosen 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.