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John Corigliano felt an immediate affinity with the poetry of Dylan Thomas when first encountering it as a 21-year-old in 1959, six years after Thomas’s death in the composer’s native New York. Forty years in gestation, A Dylan Thomas Trilogy was completed in 1999, but this performance, in Thomas’s native Swansea for the centenary of his birth, surely marked a significant personal landmark for Corigliano.
Having already set Thomas’s Fern Hill, then Poem on his Birthday, Corigliano chose Poem in October, to balance his reflection on the three ages of man. But, given the length and emotional landscape of these poems, the work is less an orchestral song cycle than a secular oratorio conceived on a Mahlerian scale. The combined resonance of the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and the BBCNOW Chorus, in the splendid Brangwyn Hall acoustic, made an undeniably strong impact, with conductor Grant Llewellyn handling the vast span with instinctive sympathy.
Baritone soloist Roderick Williams, intoning the author’s Prologue prefacing the first two poems, captured the rich declamatory flow of Thomas’s own reading voice, and he brought dark depths to Poem in October. Tenor Robin Tritschler was also sensitive to the lyricism of Poem on his Birthday with its lovely instrumental counterpoints. But more memorable still was the Hereford Cathedral chorister Michael D’Avanzo, whose singing of part of Fern Hill embodied the innocence of boyhood, the memory of which is central to Thomas’s writing. Yet no texts were provided and the words were simply not intelligible enough. Thomas may have said that his poetry was more about music than words, yet clarity would have added to the experience. The blazing fanfare of Richard Elfyn Jones’s opening Festival Overture would then have seemed all the more appropriate in retrospect.
