Tapiola Sibelius Children of Lir - Harty Macha's Curse - Michael Alcorn Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde - Wagner
Sibelius is an intriguing composer from the perspective of the 1990s, interpretable as a sort of unwitting godfather of minimalism. Gerhard Mark son conducted the late Tapiola as if he would clearly have no truck with this, and not much, either, with the idea of chilly, Nordic landscapes in the Finnish master's music. Warmth and fullness appeared to be his aims in a reading that got to the end of the piece without ever reaching its point.
The Children of Lir is another late work, this time by Hamilton Harty, arguably the greatest Irish musician of the first half of the century. Lir, with its distant, wordless soprano, promises much. As an idea, it's fine, but Harty works his not very distinctive material too hard and, as in so many other wordless vocal pieces, doesn't manage to capitalise on the resources he has assembled, least of all on the singer, here the solid Orla Boylan.
Michael Alcorn's Macha's Curse, inspired by the Northern troubles, opens with cluster bludgeons and works through a passage of drums and piccolo, with ominous low brass and an excited climax developing out of the lower strings, to the calm of an amplified flute with vocal mutterings. Although sounding stronger in broad outline than in detail, it made a distinctive impression on a first hearing.
Markson was persuasive in shaping the Prelude of the closing Wagner, but sadly seemed to lose the thread in the Liebestod, where the now departed Boylan could have done a lot to set things right.
