Meeting of the Album Club - Vaughan Williams - A Sea Symphony

B: i hereby call this meeting of Bottle's Album Club to order. First, will the secretary read the minutes of our previous meeting? 

E: 17, 19, 44. 

C: hut! 

B: is there a second? 

S: 12 of them, to be precise. Oh sorry, i meant hut hut! 

B: i definitely approve of those minutes as well. 37 was touch and go if i remember correctly, but we definitely pulled it together around 44. Any new business? 

C: well, i was rechecking the figures and i'm afraid we're out of options. 

E: what are you talking about, there's hundreds of albums left in the stacks. 

C: yes, you are of course correct, many albums our Bottle has but hasn't reviewed. I'm afraid, however, you'll find the vast majority were composed by long dead white guys of the European persuasion, ranging backward from now to the bowels of barely double-digit centuries. I don't think i need remind any of you that the world has moved well along. 

S: yeah, hard to argue people aren't tired of pontificating from crusty old white dudes. Present company excluded. 

B: why? I totally resemble those remarks. I don't think i'm the worst by a long shot, but genetically speaking i'm just about as English as beans on toast. I'll make the motion. 781 random albums from all across the spectrum, i think we can safely wade into the swamp of Equal Tempered European Aristocratic Musics of the Common Practice Period ranging from roughly the year papa Bach died up to the 2nd Industrial Revolution (we're in the midst of the 3rd, by the way). All in favor? 

Chorus: mumble, mumble, mumble, i guess so.... 

B: motion carried. Our friend Gerard mentioned he was listening to Vaughan Williams not too long ago, and i got one of them obsolete compacted vertebrae things featuring the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, so it's even got wordy words like all the other albums i like. 

First Symphony's first. 

Old Rayfee's sea is not at all like Debussy's or even Anita Kerr's. Vaughn Williams studied with Ravel, and makes use of decidedly English Folk and Renaissance approaches to melody and texture. Less turmoil or terror or passion, more fanfare, gallantry, and sentimentality. It's not much like a symphony, for that matter. It feels a lot more like a Cantata played on the Mildy Meandering River Raft Ride at Walt Whitman World. Very much like those big symphonic pastoral oil paintings our own French educated American composers liked so much, but with some chant and operatic writing thrown in. 

At just shy of an hour and a half if you're breaking the speed limit, you might need a proper intermission between each movement. I certainly need at least one bathroom break in there somewhere, whether they stop playing or not. "Unprecedented in England?" That's ringadingdangdonculously long for anyone anywhere except Beethoven or Mahler or Wagner. It's good though, so that helps. 

Like you might expect, there's nothing weird or strange about the BBC Symphony Orchestra. They're like the RP of orchestras: calm, articulate, generically understandable at all times. The instruments sound like instruments, the voices sound like highly trained vocalists with a proper amount of rehearsal time. That's usually a little dull in my book, but it's completely appropriate for Vaughan Williams, the prim and proper socialite who believed sharing music with the public was a just and worthy gift to society. Yawn. Not a condescending yawn, sorry if i mistakenly gave that impression. Even by my standards this is completely lovely. I've just had a rough week and this is a completely acceptable warm bath with fizzly stuff and smell good oil to get you through one more blizzardpocalypse day of it. Enjoy.