Martyn Brabbins’s latest BBC Symphony Orchestra concert opened with the world premiere of Iain Bell’s Beowulf, a 50-minute cantata for tenor, female narrator, chorus and orchestra, It was intended, in part, for the Australian heldentenor Stuart Skelton, though his withdrawal due to laryngitis resulted in the first performance being given at short notice by Charles Styles, a 26-year-old British tenor at the start of his career.
Skelton’s influence inevitably hangs heavily over the work, which is self-consciously post-Wagnerian and post-Romantic in scale and scope, with echoes of Mahler’s Das Klagende Lied in places. The forces required are colossal: a huge orchestra with quadruple woodwind and multiple percussionists, and an equally large choir (the BBC Symphony Chorus), often sectionally divided, the choral writing oscillating between unearthly tone clusters, chromatic ululations and diatonic lyricism. Vestiges of symphonic structure, meanwhile, lurk behind its four sections, depicting Beowulf’s encounters with his antagonists – the monster Grendel, Grendel’s mother, and a dragon – then his death and cremation.
