John Milton may be one of the greatest of British writers, but his poetry has inspired surprisingly little music from his fellow countrymen. There is no definitive setting of even part of Paradise Lost, no work based on Samson Agonistes. Hubert Parry's ode Blest Pair of Sirens is the nearest thing we have to a popular work derived from Milton. But there is also Hugh Wood's Scenes from Comus, performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra with Andrew Davis. The work takes Milton as its starting point and builds something vividly communicative and true to the spirit of the masque from which it is derived.
It is early Wood, composed for the Proms in 1965, and it defined a watershed in his development. Extracts from Milton that describe how Comus, the monstrous son of the witch Circe, abducts the unnamed Lady and involves her in an orgy, are set in eloquently defined vocal lines for the soprano and tenor soloists (the rhapsodic Susan Gritton and the firm-voiced Daniel Norman in this performance). Yet the real drama in this 25-minute work is left to the orchestra, which glitters and swaggers through a kaleidoscope of moods and suggestions. The climax is the orgiastic dance, which Wood sustains in a gravity-defying way, but both the scene-setting opening and the enchanted, disembodied close of the piece are equally striking, with every instrumental detail designed to make its mark.
There was Mozart (the Violin Concerto K211) and Debussy (La Mer) in the BBCSO's programme too, and the first performance of the latest BBC commission. Brian Elias works slowly as a composer, preferring to produce a few weighty scores rather than a plethora of lower density ones. His new piece, The House That Jack Built, is a 20-minute single movement that falls into three distinct sections. It is designed as both an evocation of the rough- and-tumble of a children's playground, with themes jostling for space, and an attempt to find a musical equivalent for the nursery rhyme of the title, in which each verse adds another line to the initial phrase.
That process occupies the central section, which is clearly defined, easy to follow and, like the rest of the work, courses with energy. But the problem with The House That Jack Built is that the material Elias works with feels too stark, too banal almost, to sustain a piece of such length. One tires of the themes long before the end, and though the premiere seemed to be superbly delivered, too much detail in the score simply didn't register.
