Brian: The Cenci album review – composer’s lack of flair for music drama all too evident

The resurgence of interest in the music of Havergal Brian around the time of the performance of his gargantuan Gothic Symphony at the Proms in 2011 has died away again, leaving only hardcore enthusiasts championing his cause. The Havergal Brian Society has long been the focus of those efforts, and in 1997, 25 years after the composer’s death, it organised the concert performance in the Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, of his opera The Cenci that has now been issued on disc.

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Brian began The Cenci in 1951, the year in which, apparently by coincidence, Berthold Goldschmidt’s Beatrice Cenci, based on the same play by Shelley, was one of four prizewinning works in a Festival of Britain competition for new opera.

Completed the following year, between his ninth and 10th of his 32 symphonies, Brian’s version was the third of his five operas, though one of the great mysteries is why a composer who, as The Cenci demonstrates all too painfully, had no obvious flair for music drama, should have persisted with the form, especially when performances seemed unlikely. His reworking of Shelley’s story of renaissance corruption, murder and incest omits some of the more gruesome incidents in the original five-act play; Brian’s eight scenes last just 100 minutes, 14 of which are taken up by the overture.

The problem is that Brian’s lumbering romanticism is never nimble enough to articulate the drama, while his scoring is too clotted to evoke the world of 16th-century Rome. The word setting is utilitarian, with far too much of the text rattled off in unvaried parlando. But while in this recording the voices sometimes struggle to cut through the textures, the cast, led by David Wilson-Johnson as Count Cenci and Helen Field as Beatrice, really do their best to bring their characters to life. Field in particular makes all she can of Beatrice’s farewell to her brother Bernardo (Justin Lavender) before they are both executed; it’s one of the few passages, just before the opera ends, when everything sparks into dramatic life.

Stream it on Apple Music (above). Not available on Spotify