Gramophone reviews Mythologies and Mad Songs

Richard Strauss once suggested that Elektra should be conducted like Mendelssohn’s ‘fairy music’. And if you’ve ever wondered what such light-footed fantasy might sound like if translated into the sound world of a virtuoso post-Straussian orchestra – well, so, apparently, has Geoffrey Gordon. His 2017 tone poem Puck – fleeing from the dawn is exactly that: a featherweight Shakespearean caprice written (to coin a phrase) on the point of a needle, and played with dazzling élan by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra under Martyn Brabbins.

And there’s certainly no shortage of colour elsewhere on this disc. Although Gordon’s tonal language is unambiguously modern, there’s a definite romantic streak here, as well as a Berlioz-like relish for the sound and physical impact of a full orchestra. Gordon admits a debt to Vaughan Williams in Ice: a massive meditation on Arctic exploration that places a very human sense of struggle in a powerfully evoked world of grinding ice sheets and thunderous menace (Gordon never spares the timpani).

Mad Song and Prometheus take their inspiration from Byron and Kafka respectively. The former is a surprisingly turbulent concerto for cor anglais, while the second casts a bass clarinet as the tormented hero. Both are played with formidable conviction by their respective dedicatees, and Slimane, in particular, brings an almost athletic power to the plangent cries and fierce, visceral trills of his solo line. The recording of Prometheus is taken from the premiere performance and I don’t think I imagined the added sense of immediacy that comes from a live occasion – but in any case, the whole album is a powerful piece of advocacy for a composer with a big imagination.