The great-great-grandson of the poet’s brother Christopher, William Wordsworth (1908-88) belonged to that mid-20th-century generation of British composers whose works are almost entirely forgotten today. Even during his lifetime, he sometimes struggled to get the attention he thought his music deserved, though after he settled in Scotland in 1961, Wordsworth seems to have enjoyed more success and recognition.
He had studied with Donald Tovey in Edinburgh in the 1930s, and apart from a period working on the land as a conscientious objector during the second world war, Wordsworth was able to devote his life entirely to composition. His output included a wide range of instrumental works, including six string quartets, but it was his orchestral music that attracted most attention, especially his eight symphonies. Toccata Classics begins its series with two of them, the single-movement Fourth Symphony, from 1953, and the two-movement Eighth, subtitled Pax Hominibus, which was his last completed work, in 1986.
Wordsworth may have been born in the same year as both Messiaen and Elliott Carter, but his music remained almost defiantly untouched by musical developments during his own lifetime. Perhaps there are occasional traces of neoclassicism of the Hindemith variety in the wiry contrapuntal passages, but it’s Sibelius who lurks most obviously between the often austere surfaces of Wordsworth’s music, especially in the lonely string and solo wind lines of the Eighth. Above all, like Sibelius again, there’s a quiet assurance about the orchestral writing, and a total avoidance of unnecessary rhetoric, even in the brassier outbursts that punctuate the Fourth.
On this evidence, the Leipāja Symphony Orchestra are a fine band, conducted by John Gibbons (who seems to have a fondness for neglected mid-century British music).
There’s certainly enough in their performances of these symphonies, and the two substantial fill-ups, the Divertimento in D Major Op 58 and the Variations on a Scottish Theme Op 72, to make subsequent instalments in this Toccata series well worth following.
This week’s other picks
Edward Gardner and the BBC Symphony Orchestra follow last year’s impressive account of Elgar’s First Symphony with an equally thoughtful and refined version of the Second, paired with the Serenade for Strings. As with the First, Gardner adopts a slow-burn approach to the symphony, which if anything serves him even better in this troubled and psychologically complex score than it did in its more straightforward predecessor. Nothing is rushed or overdone, and the tender way handles the coda, with its final appearance of the “Spirit of Delight” theme, is as moving as any on disc.
