Organist, teacher, composer, army officer, writer, broadcaster, director of the Royal College of Music: this was the brilliant George Dyson, also father to mathematician and theorist Freeman Dyson. What’s harder to reconcile is that Dyson, author of Grenade Warfare, a standard military textbook, also produced such lusciously romantic music.
Dyson’s oratorio Quo Vadis was, in part, an attempt to purge the painful memories of serving in the first world war, confronting the vestiges of post-traumatic stress two decades on. Translated literally as Whither Goest Thou? the work represents a spiritual inquiry of an agnostic rather than Christian nature, questioning life, death and the great beyond. The 1939 festival for which it was intended was cancelled because of the outbreak of war; the first part of the work was performed at the Three Choirs festival in 1946, and then in full in 1949. In this fine performance some of Dyson’s soul-searching resonated still.
Dyson’s chosen texts are a veritable roll-call of English poets from the 16th to the late 19th century, 17 all told, and also include words from ancient hymns, interwoven into nine sequences giving the cycle its nine movements. But, at an hour and three-quarters long, the dense wordiness is sometimes heavy going. The way Dyson deploys his forces – four soloists, chorus and semi-chorus and orchestra – is never quite conventional, while the outpouring of music is only original in the sense that no one but Dyson could have created a score that appears to reference so many late 19th-century composers while going its own meandering way, an ongoing lyrical flow, in lesser or fuller flood.
With the Philharmonia (in residence at the festival) under the baton of Adrian Partington, Dyson’s mastery of the interplay of vocal and instrumental writing was clear. James Oxley sang expressively in the fourth movement, Night Hath No Wings, setting words by Robert Herrick for tenor soloist with eloquent viola lines, and reflecting the sweet anguish of Dyson’s meditations. Fellow soloists Rebecca Hardwick , Alex Ashworth and Jess Dandy also brought eloquence, and in They Are at Rest, their final Alleluia! seemed to epitomise all the feel and the tradition of this festival, itself three centuries old.
• The Three Choirs festival continues until 30 July
