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.

Vaughan Williams Sir John in Love

Opera no 16

Vaughan Williams Sir John in Love

Soloists

Northern Sinfonia

Richard Hickox

I’ve never quite got on with Vaughan Williams. There are some very special moments across his wide output (the first few bars of the Sea Symphony and the end of the fifth symphony are two that come to mind) but otherwise find that he falls into cliched patterns too often and that after a while all of his music starts to pick the same (heretical view I know).

Vaughan Williams wrote six operas over his long lifetime but none of them have ever held a place in the repertory. This one waited over 20 years for its first professional performance after being first performed by amateurs and performances since then have been very rare. I can understand why. Some of it seems very quaint and old fashioned with a fair bit of ‘hey, nonny no!and it tended to meander along pleasantly but unmemorably for much of the time. You would find some interesting dramatic moments but then these would fall back into the folksong mode which to me quickly becomes cloying. 

Although one can understand why an English composer wanted to write a full length opera featuring Falstaff it was always going to be an uphill struggle when Verdi had already worked miracles with his own opera. 

So that concludes this little series of Falstaffian operas. The two by English composers didn’t really appeal. I enjoyed the others - perhaps the Nicolai most of all. You can see why it is the only one which has retained a place in the repertoire.