Behold, the Sea.

[vandermolen]

For me, another contender is Jūra (The Sea) by Lithuanian painter-composer Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis. I have a number of recordings but found (when I still found time to play music  ) Vladimir Fedoseyev conducting the USSR RT SO among the best (there must be better recordings availabel from the last decade; I haven't been in Vilnius or Lithuania for over ten years).

Bought this recording with Gintaras Rinkevičius and the Lithuanian State SO on my last visit - here on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQeub39T-9c

Yes, a lovely work - I have a recording on Marco Polo, featuring an extraordinary painting by the sadly short-lived composer on the front cover. I also have a Svetlanov version which is rather drawn out.
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[vandermolen]

And here is a very old Chandos sea compilation CD - worth having for Bryden Thomson's first rate 'Tintagel' (Bax) and Alexander Gibson's fine 'The Oceanides' (Sibelius).

The CD is dirt cheap on UK Amazon.

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[listener]

some more titles from a quick skim of my database:
Grace Williams: Sea Pictures
Zemlinsky: Die Seejungfrau (The Mermaid)
Paul Gilson: The Sea -  orchestral suite
Wagner: The Flying Dutchman
Virgil Thomson: Sea Piece with Birds
Mendelssohn: Calm sea and Prosperous Voyage op. 27 (also Beethoven op.118)
Grofé: Atlantic Crossing
Glazunov: The Sea  op. 28
Elgar: Sea Pictures  op. 37
Delius: Sea Drift
Aliabev; The Tempest

[TheGSMoeller]

Completely forgot one...A Descent into the Maelström by Philip Glass.

[jochanaan]

Most of "the usual suspects" have already been mentioned, but I wanted to mention the third movement of Debussy's orchestral Nocturnes, "Sirenes."

There's a classic recording of RVW's #1 by Sir Adrian Boult that I'm very fond of.

[Christo]

Completely forgot one ... A Descent into the Maelström by Philip Glass.

Ah! Are we including autobiographies then? 

[Lisztianwagner]

Rimsky-Korsakov's Shéhérazade, Debussy's La Mer and Ravel's Une barque sur l'océan are certainly among my favourites too. I also have to include Tchaikovsky's The Tempest and Wagner's Der fliegende Holländer.

[Sean]

I like Metcalf's Mapping Whales...

There's also Taverner's The Whale.

[aukhawk]

Sea Drift for me.  (Also Walt Whitman text of course.)

The VW is great too, and Haitink's recording is the best thing in his VW cycle (his Antartica is also very good, I think).
But lately I've preferred the much-maligned recording by Robert Spano / Atlanta SO - which is quite a bit faster, a good modern recording, and the slight American tang to the chorus is, in a strange way, 'kinda' authentic.

[pjme]

This is a more recent and more complete version of Gilson's La mer. ( extra brass & chorus in "La tempête" / The storm).



I haven't heard Gaubert's "Chants de la mer" .

Paul Le Flem's symphonic fragments from his opera "La magicienne de la mer" are quite atmospheric, but sound rather tame...



And then there is Ghedini's Marinaresca e bacchanale:
from Naxos:
His Marinaresca e baccanale ('Sea Piece and Bacchanale', 1933) is thus revealed as all the more remarkable, springing entirely from his own imagination, unprompted by external stimuli. As John CG Waterhouse, the English expert on Italian music of the period, pointed out, the Marinaresca is 'one of the very few twentieth-century musical seascapes that owes virtually nothing to Debussy.¹ The very first bars, in which the lower strings (soon joined by other bass instruments) heave up and down in typically Ghedinian interval patterns, at once suggest a mighty oceanic groundswell, over which the desolately wailing chromatic outlines on the upper instruments suggest (perhaps) the cries of sea birds or the whistling of wind in the rigging. To find comparably bleak, elemental nature music by another composer we must turn not to Debussy but to Sibelius; yet there is nothing Sibelian about the details of Ghedini's style.' Indeed, the boreal seas evoked by other Nordic composers such as Nielsen and Nystroem are more comforting than Ghedini's slow, menacing Marinaresca, with its 'strange, utterly original orchestral effects' (in John Waterhouse's words) and obsessive thematic reiterations. And the wild Bacchanale is scarcely less threatening in its darkly drunken revels. The layered textures—at one point superimposing metres of four against five against six—and strongly rhythmic motifs, particularly for the brass, have occasional affinities with American idioms, of composers such as Roy Harris (1898–1979), or even a man who was aged just three when Ghedini died, Michael Torke (b. 1961). Intriguingly, the orchestra in the only previous recording of this compelling diptych was the New York Philharmonic, conducted by the work's dedicatee Victor de Sabata, a live recording from Carnegie Hall on 5 March 1950.

[vandermolen]

some more titles from a quick skim of my database:
Grace Williams: Sea Pictures
Zemlinsky: Die Seejungfrau (The Mermaid)
Paul Gilson: The Sea -  orchestral suite
Wagner: The Flying Dutchman
Virgil Thomson: Sea Piece with Birds
Mendelssohn: Calm sea and Prosperous Voyage op. 27 (also Beethoven op.118)
Grofé: Atlantic Crossing
Glazunov: The Sea  op. 28
Elgar: Sea Pictures  op. 37
Delius: Sea Drift
Aliabev; The Tempest

Never heard of the Aliabev - what is it like?

[pjme]

Howard Hanson's "Bold island suite" (1961) was commissioned by the Cleveland Orchestra : Birds of the sea / Summer seascape / God in Nature.
haven't listened to it ...yet.

P.

[vandermolen]

Howard Hanson's "Bold island suite" (1961) was commissioned by the Cleveland Orchestra : Birds of the sea / Summer seascape / God in Nature.
haven't listened to it ...yet.

P.

It's a lovely work - classic Hanson. I was really surprised that it has not been recorded before.

[Karl Henning]

And, interesting that the Clevelanders left that to the Cinci Pops.

[Sean]

Wood Fantasia on British sea songs

VW Riders to the sea

Bax On the sea shore

[vandermolen]

Wood Fantasia on British sea songs

VW Riders to the sea

Bax On the sea shore

'Riders to the Sea' is a powerfully atmospheric and moving work. The Taverner's 'The Whale' is another work I like and have heard live in concert - many years ago.

[val]

Another work about the sea: "Tragic History of the Sea" of the greatest Portuguese composer of the second half of the XX century, Lopes Graça. A very powerful work, not only about the sea but also about the tragic destiny of the people who defied it..

[Sean]

Hi val, good that you're here.

Graca is off my horizon at present I'm afraid to say, but the Iberians indeed have their own strong tradition over many centuries.

[hafod]

Anton Rubinstein: Symphony 2 "Ocean Symphony"
The seven movements represent the Seven Seas.

I've got this on Marco Polo but cannot remember anything about it.

[listener]

Just noticed I had overlooked ROENTGEN's Een liedje van de see which I can't remember (or was unmemorable) on a cpo disc with his Symphony no.15
and BANTOCK's The Sea Reivers.