For all its passing British sea shanties and folksongs, Vaughan Williams’ A Sea Symphony does Walt Whitman’s determinedly global-oriented poetry full justice. That “pennant universal” was reflected in two superlative soloists from South Africa and the USA, our national treasure of an Anglo-Italian conductor, an Argentinian chorus director and a raft of international names in chorus and orchestra who just happen to be UK citizens.
Only one aspect wasn’t big enough for this epic journey – the Barbican Hall itself. A Sea Symphony needs space above and around it: that you get in spades at the Royal Albert Hall, perfect for choral blockbusters, or Birmingham’s Symphony Hall. Somehow even the opening modulation on "sea" after the fanfare didn’t offer what used to be called the TQ (tingle quotient), which I’d promised the young cellists in the audience (there to hear their mentor Rebecca Gilliver in the Walton Cello Concerto). 
TQs did follow, from the energetic articulation of baritone Will Liverman in “Today a rude brief recitative” to the radiant hurling out of “Flaunt out O sea” by Masabane Cecilia Rangwanasha, a soprano (and Pappano protégée, pictured above) we need in every great choral work (I can’t wait to hear her crowning the line in Mahler 8). The first movement had sweep and drive, the second (“On the beach at night alone”, one of Whitman’s most moving poetic utterances on the “vast similitude” above, mystical magic, movingly underlined by Liverman and by the orchestra at the end when the voice falls silent for a truncated recap. The “waves” scherzo was where the Barbican amplified too much noise, and we got very few of the bracing words from the chorus.
Our soloists saved us again to “steer for the deep waters only”, the ultimate journey of a soul, Pappano getting supreme atmosphere from his London Symphony Orchestra in high and low sonorities at the very end (was Vaughan Williams thinking here of the last bars of Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra, I wonder?) Even so, his energetic drive could have relaxed and expanded a bit more often (pictured below: Rangwanasha, Chorus Director Mariana Rosas, Pappano, Liverman and LSO forces at the end of the performance). 
In this week’s pair of LSO/Pappano concerts, the Nocturne for Orchestra by Elizabeth Maconchy – at one time a student of VW – echoed very beautifully the slow movement of Walton One on Thursday and the metaphysics of “On the beach at night alone”. It also set up the melancholy lyricism of Walton’s Cello Concerto. I can’t help feeling there’s a stronger voice in the comparable works for violin and viola; this first movement is the only one where we don’t hear Walton’s big personality. He even cribs from the middle movement of Prokofiev’s Symphony Concerto, premiered five years earlier in 1952, and in its original form composed for Piatigorsky, who commissioned Walton’s specimen. Still, the melody is distinctive, and LSO principal Rebecca Gilliver found the perfect inwardness for it. 
We already knew from her duet-cadenza with Carolin Widmann in Thursday’s Bernstein Serenade that Gilliver can also make very big sounds indeed, and those tumbled forth where required. The finale is an experiment that doesn’t quite work for me, with would-be-philosophical cadenzas punctuating orchestral liveliness (Walton would find a stronger solution in the finale of his Second Symphony). But the essence of the work, purple ponderings which don’t strike me as at all “sun-drenched” – the one point in Nigel Simeone’s excellent notes with which I’d take issue – were hypnotically held in Gilliver’s delivery throughout, and it’s no surprise that she forged a perfect partnership not only with Pappano but also the rest of the orchestra. Maybe we can hear her in the Prokofiev next season.
