Â鶹Éç

Live at the Â鶹Éç Proms: The Â鶹Éç National Orchestra of Wales & Andrew Manze perform three works inspired by the sea by Doreen Carwithen, Grace Williams, and Ralph Vaughan Williams.

Presented by Nicola Heywood Thomas, live from the Royal Albert Hall, London.

Carwithen: Bishop Rock
G Williams: Sea Sketches

7.30pm
Interval: Vaughan Williams’ Symphony No 1 features settings of two poems by Walt Whitman - Sea Drift and Passage to India. Poet and literary scholar Jack Parlett joins Nicola Heywood-Thomas to share some thoughts about the great American poet and his magnum opus Leaves of Grass.

7.50pm
Vaughan Williams: A Sea Symphony (Symphony No. 1)

Elizabeth Llewellyn (soprano)
Jacques Imbrailo (baritone)
Â鶹Éç National Orchestra and Chorus of Wales
Â鶹Éç Symphony Chorus
Andrew Manze (conductor)

‘Behold, the sea itself!’ Vaughan Williams’s A Sea Symphony takes the poetry of Walt Whitman and opens the floodgates to a spring tide of inspiration. Andrew Manze’s Vaughan Williams recordings have been praised for their ‘rare sensitivity and warmth’, and in the composer’s 150th-anniversary year, A Sea Symphony gets the deluxe treatment from two of the Â鶹Éç’s great symphonic choruses, plus the operatic voices of soloists Elizabeth Llewellyn and Andrew Foster-Williams. But the concert opens the way Vaughan Williams would have wanted: with a surging musical seascape from his Welsh pupil Grace Williams, and an equally nautical opener by Doreen Carwithen, composed in 1952 and receiving its first Proms performance in this, her centenary year.