Tom Coult
Monologues for the Curious (BBC commission: world premiere)
Gustav Mahler
Symphony No. 7
Allan Clayton (tenor)
BBC Philharmonic Orchestra
John Storgårds (conductor)
Reviewed by: Alexander Hall
Reviewed: 21 July, 2025
Venue: Royal Albert Hall
Things that go bump in the night. Sudden squeaky sounds. Eerie shafts of moonlight peeping through the curtains. Who isn’t secretly attracted, and then often repelled, by the spookier elements in the world around us? There is a clear link between what Tom Coult calls his “set of four dramatic monologues” (as opposed to a song cycle) and the subtitle of Mahler’s Seventh Symphony, under which it sometimes sails in promotional material, The Song of the Night. Both explore the vespertine world with its shadowy sonorities, though in Mahler’s case there is a discernible journey from darkness to light.
For his texts Coult uses a melange of fragments drawn from the ghost stories of M R James, including in the first song Twice I saw him a disguised biographical reference: “He was a Cambridge man” (which also applies to Clayton). In addition to the chilling fiction he also wrote, James was not only a distinguished scholar in his own right but also Provost of King’s College and later Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University. The words themselves repeatedly speak of a troubled soul, in which loneliness is a characterising feature with elements of self-flagellation (“a face of crumpled linen”) in the third song, A lonely hearts ad, where there was a moment of unexpected humour in this performance. At the line “the enormous, dilapidated organ”, the tenor soloist, Allan Clayton, half-turned to face the big beast in the Royal Albert Hall with all of its 10,000 pipes behind him. The first song Twice I saw him is shot through with hints of homoeroticism; the second The dreams I’ve had has a striking simile to describe the sea, “like a floor of metal, full of lurid flames”, followed by a highly disturbing line resonant with contemporary world politics, “The houses had been burnt with whole families inside”; the concluding Letitia has left me for Brighton describes the break-up of a relationship and the death of a (possibly premature) baby.
The bleakness and disorder in the texts provide a powerful underpinning for the music itself, which would have had much less of an impact without Clayton’s impressive vocal delivery: clarion-like in diction, pain repeatedly etched into the voice, melismas on words like “air” in the first song which stretched the tessitura into the heights, the head voice fully engaged for “I can’t tell you how desolate it was” in the final dialogue. This was a master class in how to act with the voice.
I couldn’t quite escape the feeling that Coult had been strongly influenced by Britten’s style in vocal writing, most particularly in The turn of the screw, but there is an undoubted debt to Mahler too. This is apparent in the exploration of unusual sonorities (harp, marimba and harmonica in the third song) and wide range of instrumental colour, the expert matching of musical expression to the text, such as in softly wailing trombones for “body of fearful thinness”, and the outpouring of anguish in big orchestral climaxes.
All this phantasmagoria in words and music provided a fitting prelude to the main work of the evening. Mahler’s Seventh Symphony had to wait three years between its completion and premiere in Prague in September 1908. Interestingly, at its first performance in Vienna over a year later it was paired with Beethoven’s Second Symphony, itself a very striking contrast. Mahler was in any case given to continual adjustments and alterations to the printed score. Had he heard John Storgårds’s performance with the orchestra of which he is the Chief Conductor, the BBC Philharmonic, he might well have rushed to clarify textures still further. Given that his inspiration for the opening idea, first heard on a tenor horn, was the action of a boat being rowed across a lake, a steady and more deliberate pulse would have aided the progression of the thematic material. Storgårds was undoubtedly drawn to the cascading sonorities which tumbled out of his orchestra with protean energy. He put a lot of energy into his conducting and was rewarded with a big sound from his players, not always impeccable in intonation and ensemble, but the overall effect was less the composer’s Allegro risoluto marking than a constant edginess and restlessness, the disparate elements never quite melding into a persuasive whole.
All these unsettling moments proved more appropriate to the first Nachtmusik, where the dark and spectral qualities were well contrasted with the march-like rhythms and a half-remembered waltz. Again, individual sonorities were given full attention: the array of cowbells, positioned centrally on the highest riser at the back of the stage, or the mellifluous four flutes designed to sound, in the composer’s words, wie Vogelstimmen (like bird calls), or indeed the clarinet signals towards the close of this movement, marked quasi Tromba (like a trumpet).
In some respects, the central movement is one of the most demonic Mahler ever wrote. It is a highly individual mixture of an eerie scherzo and a fantastic dance scene. No sleep can be imagined through these twists and turns, the music turning in on itself to reveal grotesque shapes and will-o’-the-wisp moments. Storgårds was very effective here in conjuring up the terror of the night: shrieking oboes and clarinets, bassoons squeaking in their highest register, dramatic punctuation from tuba and bass trombone, and not least the menacing snapping of the cellos and double basses.
The second Nachtmusik is marked Andante amoroso. I failed to detect much amorousness, that warm and enveloping hug which Mahler’s music in its tenderest moments can give you, in Storgårds’s approach. Partly this was due to a stiffness of phrasing, where a greater degree of rubato would have helped, but also the unnecessary highlighting through additional amplification of mandolin and guitar. Throughout the emotional temperature remained on the cool side.
Mahler’s final movement, a rondo, brings about the most abrupt change in character. During rehearsals when he got to this conclusion he announced to his players, “And now…daylight!” Attempts have been made to link this material to Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, though Mahler never actually conducted the work in the opera-house. Even if you accept that there’s a lot of Falstaffian bluster and bravado to this movement, with positivity exploding in rampant C major, the choice of a suitable tempo is crucial here. At the speed which Storgårds adopted articulation, especially by the strings, was a notable casualty. The cup repeatedly overflowed and the inevitable mopping up that followed meant a palpable lessening of tension and forward momentum. Above all a sense of majesty, of festive life-enhancing celebration, was missing from this particular mix.
Interpretations of Mahler’s symphonies very often divide opinion. In the case of the Seventh Symphony, which until recently was seen as the least understood of his output, any performance is faced with the well-nigh impossible task of reconciling all the heterogeneity. While experiencing Storgårds’ performance with the BBC Philharmonic, the image of a young child entering a candystore and glimpsing towers of shelving with jar upon jar of brightly-coloured sweet delights came to mind. The ear was drawn again and again to a kind of sensory overload, heady in itself, but unrelated to the overall structure that Mahler surely envisaged.