Walt Whitman (1819-92)

An unmistakably Sibelian chord opens the second set of Opus Sixty-Six, vistas conjured, and ‘The Chase’ is on, the LPO in hot pursuit, finding a majestic ending, riposted by the tender refrains of ‘The Love Song’, and ending with the buoyancy of ‘At the Drawbridge’, the playing suitably airy, Mark Elder’s conducting pinpointing the ingredients that make perhaps-unfamiliar Sibelius truly himself. Ditto The Oceanides (the sea in various moods, with nymphs, no shepherds), recent Proms fare for the LPO, fathoms-deep music that rises to a stormy climax, perfectly charted here. “Behold, the sea itself”, the opening (choral) words, penned by Walt Whitman, and the rest as set in Vaughan Williams’s A Sea Symphony, the First of his Nine. From the off this account glowed with an unmistakable instinct for the music, a magnificent start from LPC and LPO, oceanic, Elder marrying tempo, ebb and flow indivisibly, soprano Masabane Cecilia Rangwanasha, if a little too operatic, dignified, with baritone David Stout bringing magnetic gravitas, as he did to ‘On the Beach at Night’. The third-movement Scherzo – ‘The Waves’ (chorus) – was a little held back, short of sea-spray, if glorious in melodic richness, with the extended Finale (‘The Explorers’) requiring all participants, a half-hour of soul-searching and visionary music directed by Elder with a sure sense of compass points to expand horizons. The sound was somewhat dynamically limited, and neither the R3 website nor the continuity announcer offered more than the singularly useless “recorded last month”.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002lqxv