Stephen McNeff Orchestral Music – Bournemouth Symphony Orchest

Composer-in-residence schemes rarely produce anything worth a second listen once the tenure lapses and the orchestra moves on to its next project du jour. Stephen McNeff’s three years at Bournemouth seem to be an exception — or so this generous sampling of the crop suggests.

I confess I came to this disc knowing McNeff mainly by reputation, and that reputation mostly theatrical: a composer who cut his teeth writing for the stage, in Britain and then in Canada, learning the hard trade of getting an audience’s attention and holding it. That background shows. These four orchestral scores, all products of his Bournemouth years between 2005 and 2008, have a dramatist’s instinct for pacing even when there’s no plot, no libretto, nothing but instruments and voices to carry the argument.

Take the Sinfonia. Commissioned as a curtain-raiser, the kind of assignment that usually yields ten forgettable minutes of orchestral throat-clearing, McNeff instead delivered a compact three-movement symphony, quick-witted and translucent, that wears its craft lightly. There’s a pointillistic delicacy to the scoring, winds chattering in short spans over pizzicato underpinning, that put me in mind of Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony. Not as pastiche, but as a kindred sensibility, a composer who understands that wit and lyricism aren’t opposites.

Heiligenstadt is a different animal, darker-grained and more freighted with history. Marin Alsop asked for a piece to precede Beethoven’s Fifth, a nervy proposition, since almost anything sounds thin next to that particular opening gesture, and McNeff responded by working splinters of Beethoven into his own slowly unspooling cantilena, a kind of compositional archaeology. Shards surface and vanish. The title, of course, points to the house where Beethoven wrote his testament, contemplating deafness and suicide, and there’s an appropriate weight of shadow here. I found myself thinking of Valentin Silvestrov’s Fifth Symphony, though McNeff’s canvas is smaller and the collage craft less thoroughgoing. Still, the piece earns its unease.

Weathers, for chorus and orchestra, sets five Hardy poems and is the disc’s most purely enjoyable stretch. McNeff writes for massed voices with real relish. There’s a hail-rattled, wind-whipped energy to “She Hears the Storm” that had me picturing choristers gripping their scores against some notional gale, and the contrast when “At Day Close in November” arrives, cool and consoling after the rasp of what precedes it, is expertly timed. Comparisons to William Mathias’s This Worldes Joie or Geoffrey Bush’s A Summer Serenade aren’t far-fetched, and there’s a whiff of Britten’s Spring Symphony in the choral handling too, though McNeff’s ear is very much his own — earthier, less fastidious. The closing setting of “Domicilium,” Hardy’s earliest surviving poem, is a quiet exhalation rather than a grand peroration, and that restraint is exactly right. A lesser composer would have gone for the big emotional payoff and undercut the whole structure.

The major work here, though, and the one I suspect listeners will return to, is Secret Destinations, McNeff’s tombeau for Charles Causley. Not a setting of Causley’s poems but a portrait of the poet by a friend who knew the man rather than just the anthology pieces. It’s the second Causley-inspired score I’ve encountered on disc, after Michael Head’s Cornish cycle As I Went Down Zig-Zag, and the two make an interesting pair: Head sentimental and folk-inflected, McNeff considerably more astringent. The opening movement, “Rushing the Stone Horizon,” is genuinely unruly, full of grandeur that sounds slightly hoarse, as if shouted into wind off the Cornish coast, with jazz inflections erupting unpredictably. They recur in the central “Sfumato” too, giving the music a nervous, syncopated undertow beneath its lyricism. “Eden Rock,” the finale, named, like Causley’s own late poem, for that hallucinatory vision of reunion with his parents, closes the work not with a bang but an unhurried dissolve, a phantasmagoria that fades rather than concludes.

Dominic Wheeler and the Bournemouth players, who lived with this music during its gestation, play with the easy conviction of an orchestra that has internalized an idiom rather than merely sight-read it for a session. The chorus in Weathers sings with good diction and real attack in the storm music, though the engineering occasionally lets the orchestra crowd the choral sound in tuttis, a small complaint on an otherwise well-balanced Dutton production. Texts for Weathers aren’t printed in the booklet but are available as a download, which is a slightly cheap solution for a full-price disc, though hardly a dealbreaker.

McNeff is not, on this evidence, a radical. He’s something rarer and in some ways more useful: a genuinely skilled communicator who has absorbed a century of English choral and orchestral tradition, Britten, Tippett, Mathias, even a little Walton, without becoming their prisoner. This disc won’t change the history of British music. It will, I suspect, send a good many listeners looking for whatever McNeff writes next. Recommended, without much hesitation.