Rejoicing spirits: a compelling new Magnificat by Ryan Wigglesworth

A bracingly contrasted programme placed Ryan Wigglesworth in a distinguished line of BBC Symphony Orchestra composer-conductors from Pierre Boulez to Oliver Knussen and beyond. The complementary sequence of Monteverdi, Wigglesworth himself and Robert Schumann brought another figure from the past to mind: Bruno Maderna, lyricist and modernist in equal parts, to whom no music of significance was alien territory.

Just as Maderna orchestrated Monteverdi’s Orfeo for his own, exploratory times, so Wigglesworth has devised an entirely contemporary arrangement of the Lamento d’Arianna. First heard under the conductor’s baton at the Royal Academy of Music in 2022, this uses a string band to shade and offset the solo line with expressive punctuation: the musical equivalent of lighting for a bare-set production, nothing radical beyond the stuff of the music itself, which was sung with piercing directness by Sophie Bevan.

Bevan is the dedicatee of Wigglesworth’s Magnificat (also his wife), and she shone once more in a setting of the familiar Latin text which took a fresh look at its imagery without deconstructing it to pieces. The usual opening burst of exaltation is foregone; we find Mary alone, weighing anxiety and expectation with a human truthfulness found in psychologically naturalistic Annunciation canvases by Carracci and Van Eyck.

There is still room for joy in Wigglesworth’s Magnificat, delivered by some exuberant Monteverdian fanfares, and the kind of heaven-meets-earth choral harmonies of Tippett, major-key in flavour if not the actual notes. Without the score to hand, I wondered if some passing hesitancy from tenors and basses at “Deposuit potentes” was a casualty of the performance or an ingenious colouring of text; at any rate, the obvious similarity between the Magnificats of Bach and Wigglesworth lies not so much in their length (around half an hour) as the carefully reserved, challenging brilliance of the choral writing.

Echoes of the old Magnficat chant surfaced from time to time, such as a second section illuminated by a species of late-Stravinsky counterpoint, as a close relative to Wigglesworth’s take on the Lamento. The hieratic power of another obvious precedent for soprano-and-chorus writing, Britten’s War Requiem, is briefly evoked in the third section, but it was Bevan as Mary who imbued the setting as a whole with a reflective spirituality. In all its intricacy, the piece demands a second hearing.

Provided they have the technique to get results, composer-conductors reliably illuminate standard repertoire with the kind of firm grip on form which marked Wigglesworth’s account of Schumann’s Second Symphony. There were shades of Maderna here, too, in the brisk, early-Romantic tempi and shrewd rebalancing of Schumann’s orchestra, slimming down the strings and editing ubiquitous timpani rolls back to single strokes. Perhaps the pathos of the Adagio was kept at arm’s length, but its Baroque-era sobriety of gesture made sense in the context of a reading which kept Beethoven and Bach well in view, before cutting loose with a tremendous, one-in-a-bar swing to the finale.