Fifty years ago at the Proms, Hugh Wood made a name for himself with the premiere of a large-scale choral work commissioned by the BBC. Scenes from Comus was a setting of episodes from Milton’s masque, with music both lyrical and muscular, exuberant and introspective. Now, with his latest Proms commission, introduced by the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus conducted by Andrew Davis, Wood seems to have come full circle, with another choral work based on a 17th-century text, this time John Donne’s marriage song Epithalamion.
The roots of Wood’s new work go back to the very beginnings of his composing career in the mid-1950s, when he began and then abandoned a setting of the Donne poem. Whether any of that first attempt survives into the final 20-minute work isn’t revealed, though Wood’s fondness for the verbal imagery and its own music clearly comes across in his treatment of it. The weight of the text is taken on by the chorus; the soprano soloist (Rebecca Bottone) has a relatively peripheral role, the bass (Nicholas Epton) a more modest one still, and while a bit too much of Wood’s choral writing has a whiff of the English oratorio about it, the best passages – such as the exuberant opening, the modest, throwaway ending and their bright orchestral embroidery – are beautifully judged.
The BBC Symphony Chorus was also involved, wordlessly this time, in the final work in the programme: the second suite from Ravel’s ballet Daphnis et Chloé. That vivid pictorialism balanced the pastel shades of Delius’s In a Summer Garden with which Davis had begun, its lyrical spasms sounding rather bereft in the Albert Hall. And in between, another work was ticked off the Nielsen anniversary list when Mark Simpson was the fabulously agile soloist in the Clarinet Concerto. Simpson made what is one of the trickiest concertos in the clarinet repertoire seem totally straightforward, but perhaps lost a bit of its confrontational edge in the process; even the solo side drum, which tries hard to put the clarinet off its stride, seemed a bit of a pussycat here.
