" A hundred yards from where I sit writing this is a pub whose main claim to fame is that Dylan Thomas is said to have got so squiffy one night that he wandered off leaving the only manuscript of Under Milk Wood on the bar stool. Several local pubs have similar stories. So when a press release turned up announcing the recording of a Dylan Thomas song cycle, it had my full attention. Michael Stimpson’s Dylan tells the poet’s story from Welsh childhood through alcoholic struggles to New York death, prefacing each song with spoken Dylan. It was recorded at the Llandudno Festival, where the warm-voiced Roderick Williams and brilliant harpist Sioned Williams put in a superb performance of a winning work. But it was the other work on the disc that caught my breath, not just through the beauty of the music but because of the incredible story it tells. This was a new one on me, how in 1965 a rural Welsh community was flooded to create a reservoir for Liverpool. The village of Capel Celyn was one of the last Welsh-only speaking communities, so the proposal caused quite a stink, but went ahead regardless. Do a search for Capel Celyn and you will find some poignant footage – it’s surprising the Welsh nationalists did not use it as a recruiting show-reel. Half a century later, it seems the story is all but forgotten. Michael Stimpson stirs memories with The Drowning of Capel Celyn, a work for solo harp which is a marvellous listen for an innocent ear. Listen with knowledge of the story, though, and it is unbearably sad. The work was written for harpist Sioned Williams’ 60th birthday. Principal harp of the BBC Symphony Orchestra since 1990, she remembers sitting on the banks of Capel Celyn as a girl with her trade union leader grandfather, who told her of the efforts to stop the flooding. Her playing is superb, drawing the full resonance of the harp throughout its range. A fitting memorial to a shameful episode, the recording is out on Stone Records, the first of three CDs of the work of Michael Stimpson." (Classical Music)

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"The London-born and Wiltshire-resident composer Michael Stimpson has an unusual and in many ways inspiring biography. He initially studied Zoology and Botany whilst developing a high level of skill as a guitarist. In his mid-twenties he suffered a catastrophic illness which left him registered blind and unable to play the guitar to his erstwhile standard. Eventually, between 1993 and 1997, he undertook postgraduate studies in composition at the University of Southampton; so, presumably, only in his late forties did he come to embrace composition as his primary occupation. Alongside facts such as these, Stimpson’s website tells us that his stimulus to compose comes ‘often from contemporary events, favourite authors, and poets’. This, rather than any very obvious personal affinity with Wales, presumably explains the subject matter of the works on this disc. Dylan, composed as long ago as 2003 and premiered in that year in Swansea by Jeremy Huw Williams and Sioned Williams, is described as a ‘biographical song cycle’ on the life and works of a ‘favourite poet’ of many, Dylan Thomas (1914-53). The flooding (‘Drowning’) of the North Wales village Capel Celyn in 1965, in order to provide a reservoir for Liverpool, hardly qualifies as a ‘contemporary event’, but clearly still has a profound personal resonance for the distinguished harpist Sioned Williams, whose grandfather led the local campaign against the reservoir, and who commissioned Stimpson to write the work in celebration of her own sixtieth birthday. She proceeded to give its premiere, in London in 2014. Two works, then, composed a decade apart, and indeed recorded some eight years apart. Quite why the recording of Roderick Williams’s performance of Dylan at the 2006 Llandudno Festival has remained unissued until now is not immediately apparent. The song cycle is by some way the longer work. Is it, though, really a ‘song cycle’? One must clarify at the outset that Dylan also includes a good deal of spoken prose. It consists of eight sections, each representing (or at least echoing) a distinct phase in Dylan Thomas’s life and career, and each featuring words exclusively by him: ‘Beginnings’ (his childhood); ‘Genesis’ (his schooldays and early writings); ‘New Horizons’ (his move from Swansea to London); ‘Caitlin’ (his wedding and married life); ‘Bottled God’ (his losing battle with alcoholism); ‘War’ (his attitudes to the Second World War and move to Sussex to escape the Blitz); ‘Laugharne’ (Under Milk Wood’s ‘Llareggub’, whither the family moved in 1952); and ‘The Thin Night Darkens’ (his tragic decline and early death). Most of these sections consist of a passage of spoken prose followed by a sung poem; the exception is the pivotal fifth section, ‘Bottled God’, which actually includes no song at all, but rather two passages of prose thematising Thomas’s alcoholism, the second of which is accompanied by a decidedly inebriated harp. Most of these juxtapositions work well. For example the darkness of the second song, with its references to such things as ‘shrapnel rammed in the marching heart, hole in the stitched wound and clotted wind’ is all the more shocking when it has been preceded by Thomas’s whimsical account of his schooldays, during which ‘he helped to damage the headmaster’s rhubarb, was thirty-third in trigonometry, and, as might be expected, edited the School Magazine’. The fourth section is all the more effective for coupling Thomas’s uncomplicated, happy account of his wedding with the poetic delineation of the married man’s infinitely more complex response to Caitlin’s ‘contraries’. Musically, Stimpson’s idiom is essentially conservative. There is nothing here to deter those who normally consider themselves averse to contemporary music. Rather, his settings come across as a logical extension of the twentieth-century English art song tradition; and one is from time to time reminded, if only by the sound of the harp, of a much earlier tradition, namely the Elizabethan lute song. Stimpson’s basically tonal response to Thomas’s words has the advantage, however, that the discords he occasionally introduces have a particularly powerful effect. This is the case, for example, in the harp’s drunken accompaniment to the passages on the poet’s alcoholism, or in its heart-rending commentary on the dying poet’s question, ‘why are you putting the sheet over my face?’ I would say that, overall, Stimpson is stronger on atmosphere than on individually memorable ideas; but, then again, I thought the same of John Metcalf’s 2014 operatic adaptation of Under Milk Wood (review). Dylan Thomas was, after all, a writer of such seemingly effortless virtuosity and profundity that it is surely very difficult for any composer to impose his or her personal stamp on his words without in some way diminishing their power. Roderick Williams’s performance of all this is, quite simply, superb. His voice is throughout warm, beautiful, evenly produced over a wide range; and he evinces a laudable attention to, indeed relish of, the nuances of Thomas’s texts. I applaud his spoken contributions almost as much as his singing. His speaking voice is most attractive, and he demonstrates a high degree of both dramatic power and comic timing. The fact that he is plainly not Welsh is hardly a problem, given that Dylan Thomas’s own inimitable accent was essentially ‘R.P.’ or, as he himself put it, ‘cut glass’ and ‘rather fancy’. The Llandudno audience is for the most part admirably silent, and the occasional shows of amusement – such as, for example, the male cackle in response to the phrase ‘a piece of cold lamb with vomit sauce’ – are both understandable and endearing. Even after the emotional roller-coaster that is Dylan, Sioned Williams’s performance of The Drowning of Capel Celyn emerges as more than just a filler. I suppose a solo harp has its limitations when depicting a protracted public scandal such as that which attended the high-handed decision to ‘drown’ a long established and viable Welsh village. Yet Stimpson plays to the instrument’s strengths very shrewdly. After all, the harp is very good at establishing moods, such as ‘the feeling of the first shafts of light over a waking village’ (first movement), or the energy and fixity of purpose of those who opposed the flooding (second movement); and it is also good at water, as we see here in the third movement’s gradual transition from the trickle of a stream to the flooding of a substantial area (third and fourth movements). Last but not least, the harp transpires to be an eminently suitable medium to convey the combination of anguish and nostalgia which the 1965 decision must have left in its wake (fifth movement). Altogether this is a very effective piece, to which Sioned Williams does full justice. In sum, this is a most desirable and – if one dare say such a thing of a composer in his sixties – promising issue. The booklet tells us that Stimpson’s ‘incidental music to the opera Jesse Owens and (the four-stage work inspired by Darwin) Age of Wonders’ has been ‘recorded by the Philharmonia Orchestra for future release’. I hope I get to hear it."

(Musicweb International)

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"The full texts, both of spoken dialogue and songs, are given in the booklet; but so superb is Roderick Williams’s diction that they are hardly needed … The booklet of 24 pages gives us not only the texts, but also extensive and comprehensive notes by the composer on the music itself. This is a most attractive disc."

(Musicweb International)

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"It should be to the excitement of many that one of Sioned Williams most important commissions for harp has now been released on disc: Michael Stimpson’s The Drowning of Capel Celyn. The CD also includes the world premiere recording of Stimpson’s song cycle Dylan for baritone and harp. Based on the life of poet Dylan Thomas, the great and much-loved baritone Roderick Williams joins Sioned in this recording live from the Llandudno Festival of 2006. Highly ambitious and striking is in its form, the song cycle is unusual in that as each song is preceded by spoken text. Roddy as narrator is magnificent of course. Sioned shows formidable acting skills as she speaks the humorous lines of Mrs Cherry Owen from Thomas’ Under Milk Wood in the spoken prelude to this song: her Welsh lilt giving the perfect touch! There are eight individual settings in all, and out of these I found the songs War and The Night Darkens, to be most atmospheric and moving. If I were to make any criticism, it would be that the giggles of the live audience did occasionally detract from the text. On a personal note, the subject matter was extremely poignant for me as, since being sent the CD, a close relative died due to complications of alcoholism. Dylan Thomas’ struggles with drink are now infamous and I couldn’t help but listen to the song addressing Thomas’ addictions with sensitive ears. The solo work – about the controversial flooding of a North Welsh village to create a reservoir for Liverpool – contains many moments of great poignancy, as well as complex weavings of texture which must be intricately played. The impeccable, sensitively shaded playing by Williams, and the addition of a substantial work to the limited original repertoire for baritone and harp, make this CD an important disc to add to your collection."

(Harp Magazine)

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"The life of the poet Dylan Thomas was vividly evoked in a new song cycle by Michael Stimpson. …Stimpson’s settings of the poetry and prose enhanced the imagery, the mystery, the dark moods, the wartime horrors and the enigmatic verses dedicated to his wife Caitlin. The penetrating vocal line was supported by evocative harp accompaniment, particularly telling as a commentary on the poet’s self-confessed battle with drink. The eight sections built up a revealing and often moving picture of this flawed but fascinating genius."

(Musical Opinion)

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"Dylan is an eight-part visionary work which takes the listener through many episodes in the poet’s life. Stimpson artfully combines spoken excerpts and musical settings of Thomas’s poems, letters, stories and, of course, Under Milk Wood, in to a ruminative and evocative monodrama of depth and originality. The most stunning musical episode was Stimpson’s wonderful setting of Ceremony after a Fire Raid which received a heartfelt reading by Huw Williams, his plangent voice alternately tender and dramatic." 

(South Wales Evening Post)

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“At the close of this extraordinary work, Michael Stimpson took a proud bow beside his stars to a rapturous applause. He had given a tantalising glimpse into a troubled soul; in a story telling through words and music of rare intensity leaving the audience spellbound. ”

(The Salisbury Journal)

 

“[The piece] conveyed perfectly the two writing Dylans, the robust word play of the prose and the more elliptical world of the poems; the song settings perfectly catching that. ... Roderick Williams' dark baritone manoeuvred around the songs with great control and richness and he coped excellently with the readings, relishing the word play and the comedy. The harp is as responsible for characterisations as the voice and Sioned Williams brought it out to the full. She was particularly good with 'Caitlin'’s astringency and brilliant in the uncomfortable drunkenness of 'Bottled God'. ... Michael Stimpson’s composition is a fine understanding of Dylan Thomas, the poet and the man, and this performance made it abundantly clear just how good it is ”

(Llandudno Festival Review)

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