Dyson: Quo Vadis.(Sound Recording Review)

Barker, Rigby; Langridge, Williams; Chamber Choir of the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, BBC National Orchestra and Chorus of Wales, Hickox. Texts. Chandos CHAN 10061(2)

This nine-movement oratorio, composed just before and during World War II, can be regarded as a philosophical response to the violence of its era. Sir George Dyson (1883-1964) was a World War I veteran; on the eve of the next cataclysm he embarked on a consideration of man's place in the eternal cycle. Dyson fashioned his own text our of a variety of English poems. The first movement, "Our birth is but a sleep," to verses by Wordsworth, ends with a choral invocation of "mighty waters rolling evermore," to great rolling arpeggios in the lower strings. Confronting the horrors of the epoch, Dyson is trying to draw comfort in the idea of the transience of pain in God's grand scheme. The work's very last moments are a surprise piano ending, as if all the performing forces were being submerged in the very current of history.

Considering the scale of the performing forces--full orchestra, four vocal soloists, onstage and offstage choruses--it's remarkable how assiduously Dyson resists bombast. Tire work is marked by its extended lyricism: eternal peace made audible. A Strauss acolyte as a young man, Dyson had long since retreated to a conservative, unabashedly tonal musical language by the time Quo Vadis was composed. Brahms's Ein Deutsches Requiem is an obvious inspiration. The seventh ...