Paul Mealor: Symphony No 3 ‘Illumination’ (2017/18)

Mealor: Symphony No 3 ‘Illumination’

BBC National Orchestra of Wales
Geoffrey Paterson - Conductor
Broadcast live on BBC Radio 3 (30/11/2018)

‘Paul Mealor’s Third Symphony, over half an hour long, was most definitely not a light-hearted piece, although the notion of light lay at the core of its single movement. In a most informative programme note (and a spoken introduction) the composer showed how he had drawn inspiration from the final Paradiso section of Dante’s Divine Comedy. The last part of the poem has always tended to be somewhat neglected by composers of works on Dante, who have inevitably been drawn to the more dramatic (and more grisly) elements of the descriptions of the earlier sections. Even Liszt in his Dante Symphony, after two substantial movements devoted to hell and purgatory, restricted his depiction of heaven to a choral setting of the Magnificat with the rising thirds of the plainchant moving inexorably upwards. Mealor took the same sequence of notes not only as a binding theme throughout the symphony but also as a launching pad for a series of very beautiful (indeed heavenly) string melodies in a passage which the composer described in his programme note as ‘unashamedly Romantic’.

These episodes are surrounded by passages which the composer terms ‘music in between the notes’, sections bordering on the brink of inaudibility in places which make use of various effects: a gong suspended in water, string bows used extensively on both pitched and unpitched percussion, harmonic glissandi in the strings like birdsong, and most effectively of all the use of multiple wine glasses to provide a shimmering tintinnabulation which launches the music on its course. At the other extreme comes the very end of the work, where a slowly and impressively constructed climactic chord leads onto a duet for two sets of tubular bells engaged in clangourous competition. This is so effective that one hardly needs the final chord to bring the work to its euphonious conclusion.’

Paul Corfield Godfrey
Seen and Heard