A musical recounting of the Sea Venture’s wreckage off Bermuda in 1609 premiered recently at the Bermuda Festival of the Performing Arts.

The piece was performed by the Williamsburg Symphony Orchestra, which was founded, primarily, to present classical music educational programmes to children.

It grew from there to become the performing orchestra it is today.

The orchestra’s music director Janna Hymes commissioned the piece on discovering the close historical connections between this island and Williamsburg and Jamestown, both in Virginia.

Composer and arranger Michael Williamson crafted The Sea Venture: Sounds of the early settlers of Bermuda and Jamestown for the Williamsburg Symphony’s performance here on January 29.

A diverse collection of pieces and a new composition — a homage to the Calypso genre — form the work.

Mr Williamson drew on everything from a segment from Tchaikovsky’s The Tempest, to an early drinking song, to “tell the story of the Sea Venture through the music of the period”.

The compilation begins with selections from a collection of dance tunes called Playford’s Dancing Master, that evoke the lives of ordinary people in the early 1600s.

Mr Williamson told the audience at the January 29 concert at Earl Cameron Theatre, that he wanted the selections to reflect the excitement the passengers and crew felt as they prepared for the voyage to the sole English settlement in the New World.

He described life on board the Sea Venture using a seafaring-themed song The Water Is Wide; a drinking song called The Wild Rover; and Staines Morris, a song played for Morris dance, a form of English folk dance.

The 18-member orchestra performed Tempest, the third movement of Vivaldi’s Summer from The Four Seasons, to reflect the passengers’ and crew’s experience of the “hurricano” which brought the Sea Venture to Fort St Catherine’s beach.

The composer called on music from the British patriotic song Rule Britannia and the United Kingdom’s national anthem, God Save the Queen, to illustrate the arrival of the 150 survivors on Bermuda’s shores. Mr Williamson composed a calypso-style tune for this final movement; it concluded with Hubert Smith’s Bermuda Is Another World.

The Williamsburg Symphony Orchestra had already demonstrated their versatility, performing Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune by Claude Debussy, arranged by Arnold Schoenberg, along with Divertissement by the modern composer Jacques Ibert, and Aaron Copland’s Suite from Appalachian Spring.

Three pieces from the works of the leading ragtime composer Scott Joplin rounded out the programme.