Sea-Drift

New Zealand Listener, Volume 37, Issue 951, 1 November 1957, Page 9

Sea-Drift

EA-DRIFT, one of Delius’s major choral works, will be performed by the Phoenix Choir , and the National Orchestra conducted by James Robertson at Wellington on Thursday, November , 7. The soloist in . this work is Donald Munro, and the concert will be broadcast from all YCs. Sea-Drift is a setting of a poem by Walt Whitman, which tells simply and poignantly

the story of two birds who nest in a lonely place by the sea-shore. They are watched by a boy who came "every day, cautiously peering, absorbing, translating." One day the female bird vanishes. "And thenceforward all summer in the sound of the sea, and at night under the full of the moon... I saw, I heard at intervals the remaining one, the solitary guest from Alabama." The boy tells some of the story, and the chorus takes up the rest, personifying the lanely bird calling on the winds and stars for the return of his lost mate, his cries changing from elation to despair. The work is both lyrical and dramatic, with the sea setting suggested at the

beginning by the orchestra. Peter Warlock has described his reactions to this work, "in which the passion of the words and music rises and falls with a perfection of poise and cadence that seems to echo the very sound of the sea itself, uniting the story and its setting in a single vision that gripy the imagination with an almost uncanny tenacity." 4 Other works in the concert are the Overture "Benvenuto Cellini," by Berlioz, Serenade to Music by Vaughan Williams (with the Phoenix Choir), Symphony No. 4 in C Minor, by Schubert, and Daphnis and Chloe, by Ravel,