Haydn’s oratorio The Creation is, by any reckoning, an ambitious work to emulate, but in A Violence of Gifts, Mark Bowden, resident composer to the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, has fashioned its secular equivalent – exploring the origins of the Earth, along with man’s need to have ultimate understanding.
Poet Owen Sheers’s quietly dynamic words will doubtless take on a life of their own, but Bowden and Sheers’s close collaboration, a planned collision of creative minds, has conditioned the piece’s intense underlying energy. Their visit to the Cern particle lab in Switzerland was the contemporary parallel to Haydn’s inspirational meeting with astronomer William Herschel, and the work’s final paean is to scientists’ extraordinary research and humanity’s questioning of itself. The paean is the natural counterpart to an initial evocation of the world’s beginnings, where three defining notes taken from Haydn are established, with the dark colours of contrabass clarinet and contrabassoon adding a sense of mystery that remains present throughout.
In this first performance, the BBC National Chorus of Wales’s achievement in realising the choral writing – sustained chords making pitching and enunciation difficult – was remarkable, but the burden of conveying the philosophical wonder fell to soprano Elizabeth Atherton and baritone Roderick Williams. Their duet Imagine That Moment – with words and phrases intertwining in double helix to mirror the work’s overall structural premise – felt like the human heart of the piece, strikingly delivered. Bowden’s complex score hardly constitutes an easy listen, but is rewarding, its musical matter relentlessly churning and pullulating, with big banging from percussion giving extra edge, if not obviously climactic single moments. Its hushed ending suggests the continuing quest. The performance was expertly handled by conductor Martyn Brabbins, and his navigation of Holst’s The Planets was also notable.
