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Royal Albert Hall, LondonAndrew Davis led a rare and bewitching outing of Hugh Woods’s Scene from Comus, while Sarah Connolly was striking in The Music Makers
The premiere of Scenes from Comus at the Proms in 1965 was a breakthrough for Hugh Wood. This setting of passages from John Milton’s 1634 masque is as much a symphonic poem as a cantata, a fusion of the Schoenbergian techniques that are paraded from the very start, as the solo horn unfolds a 12-note theme, with sensuously romantic textures. Half a century on, it seems a quintessentially British work. Its third-ever performance in the Albert Hall fitted comfortably between Vaughan Williams and Elgar in Andrew Davis’s programme with the BBC Symphony Orchestra.
The orchestra is as much a protagonist in the drama as the soprano and tenor soloists, and an extended orchestral scherzo, depicting the monstrous Comus (son of the witch Circe) inviting his followers to join him in an orgiastic dance, forms the climax. That is when Wood’s score is most impressive, with an irresistible energy and sweep to the writing that the BBCSO conveyed brilliantly; soprano Stacey Tappan and tenor Anthony Gregory had to work much harder to make anything as vivid from the vocal exchanges that frame it, despite the delicacy of the nocturnal sounds in which Wood’s score envelops them. Continue reading...