‘Monologues for the Curious’ at BBC Proms – reviews

July saw the premiere of my Monologues for the Curious at the BBC Proms, by the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra and tenor Allan Clayton, conducted by John Storgårds.

It’s now available to hear on BBC Sounds by clicking here. You can also hear a little 10-minute interview feature that I recorded for Tom Service’s show on Radio 3 – click here and listen from 2h44m.

Here are some quotes from various reviews:

Ingeniously put together — verbally, dramatically and musically — Tom Coult’s new Monologues for the Curious deserves to become a classic for tenor and orchestra.

Allan Clayton, the superb soloist here, had to produce a high, disembodied head-voice in some places, a stuttering, trembling sound elsewhere, and everywhere the faultless diction required to project what were virtually four psychodramas. One marvelled that after 25 minutes he wasn’t a wreck both vocally and mentally.

It’s dark stuff but Coult’s instrumental imagination is so apt that the overall atmosphere is flamboyantly theatrical rather than morbid. With the woodwind players doubling up on melodicas, and Clayton himself flourishing a harmonica to wheeze a few chords that are then uncannily mirrored in timbre by the orchestra, there is no shortage of clever effects.

Coult’s most powerful device is to create what seem like conventionally harmonised and orchestrated backgrounds, then subvert or distort them by warping the tuning or smearing disparate chords together — just as a great ghost-story writer gradually perverts normality into creepiness.
Richard Morrison, The Times

…a name to watch after the success of his opera Violet at the 2022 Aldeburgh Festival. The sense of foreboding that hangs over the opera was also palpable in this latest work, a set of monologues based on ghost stories by MR James, which breathe a hallucinatory atmosphere.

A multitude of delicately scored sounds mingle in this shadowy, slow-motion world, including cowbells, harmonicas and melodicas, while a lowering brass chorale pulls the music towards a dark unknown…the work deserves wide circulation. I have heard it twice since on BBC Sounds, each time with increasing fascination.
Richard Fairman, Financial Times

Inspired by the ghost stories of MR James, Coult’s Monologues – four micro-dramas for tenor and orchestra – reworks James’s texts in short, cryptic poems. The soloist, Allan Clayton, made every word, including two brief refrains in French, audible and highly charged. Subjects range from the quietly erotic lure of a man in a hotel bedroom to a murderous dream, a lonely hearts ad and a dead child…Every orchestral colour was fresh, from the use of harmonicas and melodicas, sonically bendy and atmospheric, to the clicks of metronomes in the percussion section. The composer himself describes the writing for strings, at one point and accurately, as “chocolatey”…it’s a vivid and disturbing creation by a major talent.
Fiona Maddocks, The Observer

Coult’s “Monologues”…is an intensely imaginative report on dreams, and on intimate personal experience…each of the cantata’s four parts has its own wonderful streak of madness: the second speaks of dreams of lethal violence, the third announces – endearingly – “I have a kindness for owls”, while the fourth obliquely records how Letitia would lie counting the heartbeats of a baby now dead and buried. And, after the rueful words about Letitia, the cantata returns to words in French that ended the first part: “Deux fois je l’ai vu; mille fois je l’ai senti. (Twice I saw him, a thousand times I felt him.)” As the singer repeats and repeats these words, the listener’s imagination is given scope to the ways in which the writer “felt” this man he saw twice.

For Coult, these words seem a springboard into further realms of musical fantasy. His use of an ensemble of brass instruments – sometimes as a mute chorale – in the opening “Twice I saw him” is brilliantly disconcerting: while the bows of violins sometimes become percussion instruments.

And his deployment of the superb tenor voice of Allan Clayton is gloriously strange…I hope “Monologues for the Curious” has an afterlife with other tenors around the world, but, after Monday’s premiere, I have already used BBC Sounds in happy astonishment to listen again and again to Clayton’s and Coult’s wonderful achievement. Coult has been collaborating with the BBC Philharmonic for years (those sliding and accumulating brass sonorities evidently come from his experience with these players). The conductor John Storgårds made sure that “Monologues” felt like a magnum opus, an invaluable work of musical poetry.
Alastair Macaulay, Slipped Disc