A Hughes Dewi Sant (Saint David) Susan Bullock (soprano), Rhodri Prys Jones (tenor), Paul Casey Jones (baritone); Chorus of the BBC National Orchestra of Wales/Owain Arwel Hughes Rubicon RCD1100 73:48 mins
Unlike some other works brought into being by the 1951 Festival of Britain, Arwel Hughes’s Welsh-language oratorio Dewi Sant(Saint David) actually achieved numerous performances. Good reviews, too, one critic noting that its ‘Celtic fervour and grandeur...was exceedingly charming and beautiful’. Those qualities haven’t diminished in this spirited recording conducted by the composer’s son, though it’s unfortunate that the dramatic force of Hughes’s music isn’t matched by any overpowering drama within Aneirin Talfan Davies’s libretto as it drifts through different stages in the life of Wales’s patron saint.
Hughes worked in the BBC’s music department for almost 40 years, and much of this score could have been written in Britain decades before 1951. Some bars indeed suggest watered-down Handel. Yet none of that stops the oratorio being craftsmanlike and immediately expressive, and most of Owain Arwel Hughes’s forces attack it with vim. Brass outbursts and Paul Carey Jones’s baritone solos as the voice of David are particularly striking, and if soprano Susan Bullock seems ill at ease, the BBC chorus sail through with honey in their throats and joy in their hearts. It is good to finally have a recording of such a communicative, warm-hearted and uniquely Welsh work.
Geoff Brown