London orchestras show their sense of adventure with new narrative works — review

The bane of a composer’s life these days is the 10-minute commission, planned to start a concert on the principle of “Let’s get this over before the real music starts”. There should be a round of applause for promoters who are ready to commit to new works of size and stature.

Two orchestras in London are braver than most. While the BBC’s commitment to classical music again seems to be up in the air, the BBC Symphony Orchestra showed its mettle in a venturesome concert that included the premiere of Iain Bell’s Beowulf, a large-scale dramatic work for narrator, tenor, chorus and orchestra.

A filleting of the 1,000-year-old poem takes Beowulf from his defeat of Grendel to his death over the space of a 45-minute musical setting. The compression of the story means that action predominates and Bell sends his chorus and orchestra into the melee with the full force of some unvaryingly robust orchestration and a lot of decibels. A portentous sense of the weight of the Old English epic hangs over the music, but there is not much else.

It proved to be an uneven battle. The narrator, Ruth Wilson, was almost wholly inaudible despite generous amplification; tenor soloist Charles Styles, heroically replacing Stuart Skelton at short notice, fared marginally better thanks to his determination. On a purely practical level the piece does not work.

Amends were made by pairing Bell’s new work with the biblical tale of Vaughan Williams’s Job. This “masque for dancing” is one of VW’s strongest scores, as was demonstrated in this vivid performance, conducted by Martyn Brabbins.

★★★☆☆

By coincidence, another narrative work, also like a little opera for chorus, had its premiere last weekend in a concert by the London Philharmonic Orchestra. Elena Langer’s The Dong with a Luminous Nose gives Edward Lear’s nonsense poem to the chorus (there is no vocal soloist here) and manages to keep the words at least tolerably clear by creating diaphanous orchestral textures. Her music is affectionate, gently humorous, with a dusting of magic thanks to tinkling percussion, another feature it shares with Bell’s Beowulf. It was not clear why there needed to be a part for solo cello, but Kristina Blaumane dispatched her duties with honour.

The concert had opened with another recent piece, Nova by Victoria Vita Polevá, a “dedication to the courage of Ukraine”. Trumpet fanfares lead to pounding rhythms and an energising depiction of the heroic spirit in a time of adversity. From there to Shostakovich’s Symphony No 5, also seen these days in the context of a composer railing against political oppression, was a small step, and conductor Andrey Boreyko’s performance was impressively concentrated.

With Heiner Goebbels’ ambitious musical collage of world voices, A House of Call, coming up next weekend, this is proving to be a very adventurous season from the London Philharmonic Orchestra.

★★★★☆

barbican.org.uk; southbankcentre.co.uk