… comes from our critic in residence, Alastair Macaulay:
When you read about it beforehand, the Albert Hall Prom of July 21 – played by the BBC Philharmonic, conducted by John Storgårds – seemed to consist of two very unalike works. Before the interval would be the world premiere of a cantata, “Monologues for the Curious”, by young British composer Tom Coult (b.1988, pictured); after it would come the Seventh Symphony of Gustav Mahler (1870-1911), which had its world premiere in 1908.
In the event, connections surfaced between the two works. How many composers other than Mahler use cowbells? Well, Coult does so here. And he’s happy to add other eccentric sounds to his orchestra – harmonicas and melodicas not least.
Both this concert’s works proved to be exceptional studies in subjectivity. No work of Mahler’s seems a more fevered dreamscape than his Seventh Symphony, with its tremendous changes of tempo and subject, and its two night-music movements. And though Coult’s “Monologues” is far more wide-awake, it is an intensely imaginative report on dreams, and on intimate personal experience. My point is not that Coult’s music is heavily derivative of Mahler’s but simply that Coult and Mahler are related by temperament and imagination.
Coult has arranged texts from fragments of the writings of the writer of ghost stories, M.R.James, into four parts. Only the first part is homoerotic – the fourth is about a woman named Letitia, who may have been mother of the writer’s child – but we can call the whole cantata “queer” in the largest and least pejorative sense of the word. The opening lines introduce us to the personal and sometimes amusing (and very un-Mahlerian) tone:
“He seemed a troubled man/
but he suited me./
He was a Cambridge man,/
(For me they have always had a very strong attraction.)”
But each of the cantata’s four parts has its own wonderful streak of madness: the second speaks of dreams of lethal violence, the third announces – endearingly – “I have a kindness for owls”, while the fourth obliquely records how Letitia would lie counting the heartbeats of a baby now dead and buried. And, after the rueful words about Letitia, the cantata returns to words in French that ended the first part: “Deux fois je l’ai vu; mille fois je l’ai senti. (Twice I saw him, a thousand times I felt him.)” As the singer repeats and repeats these words, the listener’s imagination is given scope to the ways in which the writer “felt” this man he saw twice.
For Coult, these words seem a springboard into further realms of musical fantasy. His use of an ensemble of brass instruments – sometimes as a mute chorale – in the opening “Twice I saw him” is brilliantly disconcerting: while the bows of violins sometimes become percussion instruments.
And his deployment of the superb tenor voice of Allan Clayton is gloriously strange. In recent months and years, London audiences have seen Clayton as Handel’s Jephtha, Elgar’s Gerontius, Britten’s Peter Grimes, Christian in Mark-Anthony Turnage’s “Festen”; in this Coult creation, we learn even more of his abilities. The vocal line rises to heroic but lingering heights in the words “The air seemed to shake and shimmer” (the word “air” shines like a long sunburst) but stammers in neurotically, shy isolated syllables in “The Dreams I’ve Had”. Who knew he had the delicacy for the wry diction, both confessional and declaratory, for the line “I have a kindness for owls”? Overall, the cantata’s vocal lines go both low and high; Clayton plucks notes from the air with effortless attack, sustains soft and/or firm lines like gossamer, and finds a panoply of colours ranging from clarion brass to sensuous intimacy. Clayton is one of the greatest singers of today. How lucky we are that he has modern composers to challenge him, and how lucky they are that he has the commitment to follow their lead.
I hope “Monologues for the Curious” has an afterlife with other tenors around the world, but, after Monday’s premiere, I have already used BBC Sounds in happy astonishment to listen again and again to Clayton’s and Coult’s wonderful achievement. Coult has been collaborating with the BBC Philharmonic for years (those sliding and accumulating brass sonorities evidently come from his experience with these players). The conductor John Storgårds made sure that “Monologues” felt like a magnum opus, an invaluable work of musical poetry.
Countertenor Hugh Cutting has been singing in Handel’s “Rodelinda” at Garsington with a distinguished cast led by Lucy Crowe: I chastise myself for missing that. This is the singer who was, in 2021, the first countertenor to win the Kathleen Ferrier Award; he has now sung at musical venues from Carnegie Hall to La Scala. At the Wigmore Hall on Thursday 24, he and pianist Dylan Perez presented an evening of songs about man’s relationship with nature. Five existing songs – Stanford, Ireland, Vaughan Williams, Errollyn Wallen, and John Denver – made a synthesis of twentieth-century views of the elements as they become part of our view of the outer world. After the interval, Cutting and Perez gave the world premiere of the cycle, “The Glass Eye”, with piano accompaniment (Dylan Perez), at the Wigmore Hall.
I find Cutting a marvellous singer, Perez an admirable accompanist, Alex Ho an unremarkable composer, Elayce lsmail a dismal poet. Cutting is a free spirit, charming, spontaneous, and visionary as he shapes Vaughan Williams’s rapt account of Tennyson’s “The splendour falls from castle walls”. His diction is pure and unaffected, his vibrato marvellously calm and unobtrusive, his personality direct and innocent; he sculpts vocal lines architecturally and without strain. But in “The Glass Eye” Ho’s music goes through the motions of what today’s countertenors can manage without ever trying to take Cutting where he has never been or even to show why he can make a effect effect singular among today’s singers. (I first marvelled at him as the Spirit in a 2023 concert “Dido and Aeneas” with Joyce DiDonato at her finest.)
Ismail’s clumsily expressionistic words keep repeating lines about “Mud men” and “The Glass Eye blinks”, dirt, soil, air. Ho’s music is less limited – it’s at its best in a few sequences at the top and bottom of the piano world work – but it is not more imaginative. Cutting, who occasionally kneels or gestures while singing, gave it his all – but it was impossible not to feel it held him back.
Alastair Macaulay
The post Best Proms review so far… appeared first on Slippedisc.
