Tovey: The Bride of Dionysus

Opera no 77

Tovey: The Bride of Dionysus

Soloists

Ulster Orchestra

George Vass

Tovey is very familiar as a writer on music - his Essays on Musical Analysis are still worth reading even though they are now rather dated in style -  but although I knew that he composed I had never heard a note of his music.

I suspected that Brahms would be a major influence and that is undoubtedly the case - indeed the prelude to the opera is almost pure Brahms in places. But there was more to this piece that pastiche Brahms. There were some elements of late 19th century opera - French and German - and the English choral tradition was never far away. This recording was of extracts only, but there was enough here - over 60 minutes of music - to get a sense of what the whole piece might be like. It was obviously by a high competent musician who was in command of his material but I didn’t detect much of a individual voice or oa sense of overall coherence - just a series of quite stylistically varied individual pieces.

The notes with this recording tell us that the opera was considered for performance in the early seasons at Glyndebourne. Those plans never same to fruition - partly because the scale of the work was too large for the small theatre - and it seems that there have been no serious attempts to stage the work again. I suspect that its time has passed. So, another interesting byway of English operatic history.