Pacific Chorale Will Go to Sea With Walt Whitman-Inspired Works

Ray Bradbury is just one in a long line of people inspired by the soaring, democratic visions of American poet Walt Whitman.

Equally and deeply moved were two British composers whose settings of Whitman texts will be sung on the Pacific Chorale’s “Celebration of the Sea” program at 8 tonight at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa.

Each composer captured Whitman in wildly contrasting moods.

Frederick Delius’ “Sea Drift” uses the middle section of “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” to depict the sea as a setting for tragedy, loss and personal growth.

Ralph Vaughan Williams’ “A Sea Symphony,” to four short Whitman poems, on the other hand, views the sea as a common lake for bustling, international commerce, human heroism and mystical visions.

Written in 1903-04, the Delius piece is a single, seamless 25-minute movement for baritone, chorus and orchestra, written in intense, richly chromatic harmonies.

The text relates the story of a boy’s sorrow at witnessing a sea bird’s loss of its mate.

At first merely a curious observer, the boy begins to be moved by the birds’ devotion to each other and their daily tending of their nest.

With the sudden, unexplained disappearance of the female bird (“Maybe kill’d,” the boy conjectures), he starts to identify with and then speak for the anguished mate. In doing so, he discovers the deeper pain and unresolved mystery of life.

It is not clear whether the bird or the now-matured boy speaks the final lines:

O I am very sick and sorrowful . . .

But my mate no more, nor more with me!

We two together no more.

Vaughan Williams’ mammoth, sometimes ungainly, often inspired “Sea Symphony” has all the energy and optimism one would expected from a young composer finding himself in writing his first symphony.

It took him six years to do it, 1903-09.

The work, for soprano, baritone, chorus and orchestra, is constructed in the standard four movements for a symphony, with each movement describing the sea in different moods.

Even for those of us who have seen pictures of Earth taken from the moon by astronauts, Whitman’s imagined view of Earth as seen from the far reaches of space remains astonishing. Vaughan Williams’ music for these lines (used to open the final movement) reflects the kind of radiance with which Haydn depicted Earth’s first day in his oratorio “The Creation.”

The movement goes on to draw parallels between voyaging upon the ocean and the voyage of the human soul through life. Whereas Delius’ work ends in despair, Vaughan Williams’ ends with an avid call for endless spiritual exploration:

O we can wait no longer,

We too take ship O Soul,

Joyous we too launch out on trackless seas,

Fearless for unknown shores on waves of ecstasy to sail . . .

O farther, farther, farther sail!

Also on the program will be Delius’ wordless chorus “To Be Sung on the Water” and Sir Charles Villiers Stanford’s impressionistic “The Bluebird.”