William Wordsworth : Orchestral Works

Album review

The Lyrita label's series of albums based on BBC radio broadcasts of the 1970s revive not only a good deal of unknown music, but also some attitudes of a bygone day. From the notes here you learn, for example, that the opening chords of William Wordsworth's Symphony No. 1 in F minor, Op. 23, were greeted with listener complaints because of their dissonance, when in fact they're not really dissonant at all, but merely chromatic and fully anchored in the home tonality of F minor. Be this as it may, the F minor symphony is worth a fresh hearing. Wordsworth, apparently a distant relation of the poet, was a Scottish composer who studied with the great Beethoven scholar Donald Francis Tovey, and you can hear that in this concise symphony that sounds a bit like the later Havergal Brian in its superimposition of an extremely terse motivic language onto a late Romantic tonal vocabulary. Sample the opening movement (track 2) above all. Wordsworth called the symphony, just shy of 34 minutes long in total, "long-winded," which gives you an idea of what he was aiming for, and the work also reflects its wartime surroundings as it takes on layers of grim grotesquerie as it proceeds; sample the bitter finale for what may well be Wordsworth at his best. It's quite a powerful little symphony that any orchestra might profitably program, and it receives a crisp reading here from the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra under James Loughran. The more relaxed Symphony No. 5 in A minor, Op. 68, composed in 1960s, makes less of an impact, but is beautifully orchestrated. The 1968 Overture "Conflict" for orchestra, Op. 86, was said by the composer to have been abstract, not a reaction to the contemporary Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia; it too is less likely to stick with you than the Symphony No. 1 in F minor. The albums in this Lyrita series were taped off the radio by a BBC listener using high-end equipment, but they're still recordings made off the radio. Recommended for listeners interested in the large corpus of forgotten British music of the middle 20th century.

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