BBCSSO/Wigglesworth / Booth review – Brett Dean’s music is rich and unusual | Classical music

Yyou can talk about composition, flow and direction all day, but when Elgar gets it right you just hear it. The Great First Symphony hits somewhere between the heart and the head, each pulling you back and forth between admiration and emotion in a piece that Hans Richter called “the greatest symphony of our time”. In their first Prom of the season Ryan Wigglesworth and BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra they gave us a good story, played liberally in the hall, but we never saw “it”.

Wigglesworth is a conductor who thinks in chapters, you can hear the long lines of his buildings from the hyper-hushed opening Andante – whose payoff will appear almost an hour after the end, when we get to where we started and know it for the first time. But we could also hear the orchestra reflecting on the passage. The transitions are often interesting in the first two movements, the final parts of the Allegro lacked clarity, the balance was not clear in the Adagio. Nothing deadly, but enough to make us think and not feel.

There was a lot of resonance in the first half, in the sweep and sparkle of Judith Weir’s 1995 film Moon and Star – Emily Dickinson’s poem shimmering under the orchestra, less traditional than a prismatic explosion of images, crystal verse at its center – and the New World Orchestral’s Thetcheatric. A woman.

Carol Ann Duffy’s wry, confessional, irreverent verse offers five poems of a work that looks over the shoulders of famous men – Icarus, Darwin, Perseus – on the women who stood behind them in the shadows. Soprano Claire Booth is an animal on stage, taking Duffy’s notes and folding them variously into a song of love, drama, prayer and meditation. He is supported by Dean, who puts the monodrama somewhere between Pierrot Lunaire and Façade – elaborate and slightly twisted, but so vivid and mysterious that it creates new spaces in Duffy’s strong, familiar poetry, full of ambiguity and interest.