The tenor soloist Charles Styles excelled, stepping in for an indisposed Stuart Skelton at the last minute, and navigating some treacherous high climbs. The narrator Ruth Wilson was heroically unobjectionable. But there's no point in having such a palette if all you’re going to do is smoosh everything together. We could have been listening to the adventures of Babar or Buzz Lightyear as much as Beowulf.īell’s forces are enviably vast: including a large choir, four percussionists and a small army of winds (usually a sign of good times). Sure, the piece swooshes around in a perfectly plausible dramatic manner, but it’s generic. Instead of exhuming the work from the pungent, squelchy depths of the orchestra – as someone like the late great Harrison Birtwistle might have done – Bell lets this primordial story float messily in the highest registers, and crowns it with a sprinkling of sparkly percussion more suited to a John Lewis advert. It’s a curious aspect of Iain Bell’s new musical adaptation of the Anglo-Saxon tale of horror and revenge. When I think of Beowulf I think of bogs and blood-soaked pelts and satanic hallucinations and swords slicing through flesh. BBC Symphony Orchestra & Chorus/Brabbins & Charles Styles, Barbican Hall ★★☆☆☆
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