The Sea… When composers face the deep.

The Music

The Words

Hello everyone. Welcome to the ‘Classical For Everyone’ Podcast. Five hundred years of incredible music. My name is Peter Cudlipp and if you enjoy any music at all then I’m convinced you can enjoy classical music.

But it can perhaps be hard to know where to begin… especially when there is just so much good music to choose from. So each episode of the podcast is going to be tied together with a bit of a theme.

And for this episode, all the music is going to be somewhat concerned with, or inspired by, or an attempted description of The Sea. That music playing in the background is called ‘Games of The Waves’ and is from a larger work called ‘La Mer’ or 'The Sea’ by Claude Debussy and I’ll play it to you a little later along with Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s ‘Sheherazade’ an unfairly small section of Benjamin Britten’s ‘Peter Grimes’, the overture to Richard Wagner’s ‘The Flying Dutchman’, a bit of Debussy’s solo piano music, and New Zealander Gareth Farr’s massive ‘From the Depths sound the Great Sea Gongs.

Ok, first up, Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s ‘Sheherezade’ for which he used the collection of Arabian Tales known as ‘The Thousand and One Nights’ as inspiration. Rimsky-Korsakov had a pretty unorthodox pathway to becoming one of the finest composers of his generation and one of the best teachers of the next. Born into the Russian aristocracy in 1844; by the time he was 18 he was serving as an office in the Russian Imperial Navy including a trip across the Atlantic to New York in 1863. Maybe this experience contributed to the music of the ten minute opening of ‘Sheherezade’, the section titled ‘The Sea and Sinbad’s Ship’.

This is the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra conducted by Kirill Kondrashian and the violin solo is played by Hermann Krebbers.

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That was ‘The Sea and Sinbad’s Ship’ from Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s ‘Sheherezade’. It was played by the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra conducted by Kirill Kondrashian and the violin solo was played by Hermann Krebbers.

English composer Benjamin Britten’s 1945 opera ‘Peter Grimes’ is set in a fishing village on the wild coast of Suffolk. Britten interrupted the opera with six interludes… in effect short pieces for the orchestra to play while the set is being changed… and each of them captures a particular mood of the sea. To refer to them as music for set changes is not what you’d call talking them up but Britten recognised how powerful and evocative they were and later he grouped them into a stand-alone work for orchestra… which he called ‘Four Sea Interludes’.

Here is the first of them called ‘Dawn’. It is about four minutes long and here is the composer, Benjamin Britten, conducting the Royal opera House Orchestra of Covent Garden.

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That was the composer Benjamin Britten, conducting the Royal opera House Orchestra of Covent Garden with ‘Dawn’ from his ‘Four Sea Interludes’.

Alright continuing this show’s theme of The Sea it all now gets a bit more dramatic by way of an overture to another opera. The story of Richard Wagner’s ‘The Flying Dutchman’ is about a man who has been cursed to sail the oceans until he can be saved by a woman’s love. Her flees raging storms and finds refuge in the icy fjords of Norway. The overture does a great job of creating the drama of a stormy Sea. It’s about twelve minutes long and here is Christoph von Dohnanyi conducting the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra.

The overture to Richard Wagner’s ‘The Flying Dutchman’.

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That was Christoph von Dohnanyi conducting the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra in the Overture to Richard Wagner’s opera, ‘The Flying Dutchman’.

After all that orchestral drama here is a little piece of solo piano music. Keeping maybe a little loosely with the theme of the Sea… this is a work called ‘The Sunken Cathedral’ by Claude Debussy from 1910.  Music writers and critics took the term ‘impressionism’ from painters and applied it to several composers at the end of the nineteenth century most particularly Debussy. You could spend significant amount of time trying to get a synthesis of all the various attempts at defining ‘musical impressionism’… but in very simple terms I see it as a way to evoke both the emotion of the experience of a place as well as hinting at the literal physical experience of it. And with that a sort of fragmentary, dreamlike context can be a part of the composer’s intent… the idea of things being half-remembered. So, in ‘The Sunken Cathedral’ Debussy’s music I think creates the sort of blurring effect that comes when looking at something seen underwater whilst rhythmically evoking the play of the waves.

Here is the pianist Pascal Rogé with Claude Debussy’s ‘The Sunken Cathedral’.

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That was the pianist Pascal Rogé with Debussy’s ‘The Sunken Cathedral’.

The next piece I am going to play has a distant but I think very apt connection (at least for this episode) with Benjamin Britten’s Four Sea Interludes… one of which I played about twenty minutes back.

Back in I’m guessing the 1980s (though the anecdote doesn’t give a date) a young New Zealand percussionist by the name of Gareth Farr was freelancing in Japan and got a gig performing with the London Symphony Orchestra which was being conducted by Leonard Bernstein and when they were rehearsing a section of Britten’s ‘Four Sea Interludes’ Bernstein interrupted the playing and spoke to the percussionists. Here’s what Gareth Farr wrote about it…

He said to us, hands held up, face contorted with a look of profound emotional intensity: ‘I want you to make those bells sound like Great Sea Gongs…’And I thought: ‘Sea Gongs? What on earth are Sea Gongs?’ But then, when we played it again, I could see the Sea Gongs — masses of gleaming bronze, covered with seaweed, lurking far beneath the waves, waiting…

Some years later, Farr, by now a leading composer in Aotearoa, or New Zealand, was commissioned to write a piece for the 75^th Anniversary of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra in 1997 and he came up with a work that harnessed the full strength of the orchestra with a very strong sense of the Pacific Ocean culture that New Zealand is a part of… and he called it ‘From The Depths Sound the Great Sea Gongs’. Here is the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra conducted by Kenneth Young performing the first part. It’s about 8 minutes long.

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That was the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra conducted by Kenneth Young performing the first part of Gareth Farr’s ‘From The Depths Sound the Great Sea Gongs’.

One final piece for this episode of the Classical For Everyone podcast focusing on music in some way inspired by The Sea. And few pieces fit that bill better than another work by Claude Debussy that he called ‘La Mer’ or in English, ‘The Sea’ from 1905. I’m going to play you the middle of the three sections… called ‘Games Of The Waves’. It is about six minutes long and here it is performed by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Herbert Von Karajan.

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That was ‘Games of The Waves’ from Claude Debussy’s ‘The Sea’ and it was the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Herbert Von Karajan.

My name is Peter Cudlipp and you have been listening to The ‘Classical for Everyone’ Podcast. If you would like to listen to past episodes or get details of the music I’ve played please head to the website classicalforeveryone.net. There you will also find some mini-episodes that address some of what I want to call the vexing questions for a listener new to Classical Music like… ‘Are conductors actually important?’; ‘Why does the word ‘sonata’ keep turning up?’ and ‘Why is almost everything in Italian?’.

I hope you have enjoyed this episode of ‘Classical For Everyone’. If you want to make sure you don’t miss the shows as they are released then please Subscribe or Follow wherever you get your podcasts. That would also mean the search algorithms will smile more benignly on the show and it might reach a few more people. For that I would be very grateful. And if you want to get in touch then you can email… info@classicalforeveryone.net. Thanks for your time and I look forward to playing you some more incredible music on the next ‘Classical For Everyone’.

This podcast is made with Audacity Software for editing, Wikipedia for Research, Claude for Artificial Intelligence and Apple, Sennheiser, Sony, Rode and Logitech for hardware… The music played is licensed through AMCOS / APRA. Classical For Everyone is a production of Mending Wall Studios and began life on Radio 2BBB in Bellingen NSW, Australia thanks to the late, great Mr Jeffrey Sanders. The producers do not receive any gifts or support of any kind from any organisation or individual mentioned in the show. But, never say never.

And if you have listened to the credits… here is a little bonus for you… Here is the pianist Yuja Wang with a short piece by Sergei Rachmaninoff from his second group of what he called ‘study-paintings’ from 1916. And it has been given the subtitle of ‘The Sea’.