![]() ![]() Wigglesworth’s sparing use of his orchestra gave her the space to achieve this. Watts’s soft-edged, buoyant soprano and clear diction put it across compellingly, really drawing us in during the quietest passages. Till Dawning was premiered in piano-accompanied form by Wigglesworth and his wife, Sophie Bevan, in 2018 Bevan also sang the orchestral premiere that year but is now undergoing cancer treatment, and so it fell to Elizabeth Watts to sing this, the first UK performance of that full version. With Wigglesworth conducting the BBC Symphony Orchestra, it worked well here as a lead-in to the weightier but similarly ripe soundworld of Mahler’s Symphony No 5. The composer and conductor Ryan Wigglesworth has certainly found them inspiring: his song cycle Till Dawning is an absorbing 20-minute work setting verses from Herbert’s 1633 collection The Temple. H ad Mahler been drawn to English poets he would surely have found a good match in George Herbert, whose words find the divine in the everyday, mixing the sensual and the spiritual. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |