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The Elgar Bursary was set up to support a new work which "may push back musical boundaries" but doesn't frighten the horses — "in short, a work of which Edward Elgar himself might have approved". Its second recipient was Dominic Muldowney, whose Tsunami, written in conjunction with the poet James Fenton, was given its world premiere by the BBCSO.
It's not an elegy for victims of a natural disaster but a monodrama about a man whose life is in pieces following a marital break-up; encountering television footage of the Asian Tsunami, he identifies with the sufferers and finally achieves a mental equilibrium. Fenton's characteristically observant, frequently arresting verse is squandered by Muldowney, who sets it in the style of a musical. That's fine in principle, but not when it's so exiguous in invention, with such lumpen word-setting — delivered here by Philip Quast.
© Associated Newspapers Ltd.
