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James Fenton is a poet who presumably feels comfortable about supplying words to composers (not everyone does). In the interests of his pension he has worked on West End musicals. But in the interests of his soul he also works with higher minds like Dominic Muldowney; and that relationship continued in a new orchestral song cycle premiered last week-end at the Barbican by the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus under Andrew Davis.
Called Tsunami, it was not, as you’d think, about cataclysmic natural disaster but about domestic breakdown: the end of and affair. And though this is a subject Fenton does well (it’s his home territory) it isn’t exactly bodies on the beach. That the historical event of the 2005 tsunami gets pulled into the story – as something the love-lost narrator watches on television and relates to his own emotional hurt – sort of justifies the title, but bathetically; and I’m not sure it was one of his wisest literary decisions.
But that said, the poems are classic Fenton: deeply felt but open-textured, so ideal for singing you could call them lyrics as opposed to verse. And that’s how Muldowney deals with them: as theatre songs, set not for a classically trained voice but foe a Broadway-style singer – in this case, Philip Quast, known for his starring roles in South Pacific and Les Mis.
Pairing off Quast with the BBCSO in a new work scheduled to sit alongside a Vaughan Williams symphony and Gustav Holst cantata generated certain tensions, but they were productive ones. And despite an annoying quaver in the voice, its feisty, steel-edged power fuelled a true Broadway ability to "sell" the songs – exploiting all the licence that Muldowney’s lyrical, eclectic, brilliantly resourceful music gave them to do exactly that. These were songs intended not just to be sung but acted, "off the page" as theatre people say. And on his two foot-square patch of the concert platform, Quast made loose but powerful theatre of a kind that almost made you feel the text could justify the title. Almost.
© The Catholic Herald.
