In the week of Dylan Thomas’s centenary, Bangor University’s School of Music has staged one of the most inventive celebrations: their series of concerts, My Friend Dylan Thomas, examined how composers across the musical spectrum have been inspired by the poet’s words. The question of what his intended collaboration with Stravinsky might have produced remains tantalising. But at the heart of Bangor’s commemoration was the work of Thomas’s best friend, the composer Daniel Jones, whose own genius may be seen as an inspiring element in the poet’s early development.

Following his incidental music for Under Milk Wood, Jones wrote his Fourth Symphony in memory of Thomas. In this performance by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, both the rawness of grief and the essentially lyrical nature of his elegy emerged. Conductor Grant Llewellyn sustained the long span of the work from the opening Maestoso, where a slow lamenting tread periodically breaks into anguished outbursts, through the exuberant and capricious scherzo to the final return to the inescapable fact of death.

Jones would surely have appreciated the implicit logic of Andrew Lewis’s setting of Fern Hill, given its premiere here. Thomas’s own recorded reading of the poem became the very fabric of the piece, with the voice, its cadences and inflections, electronically threaded through the music. Lewis’s balancing of rage against the idyll of childhood was strikingly achieved. Yet Thomas’s words were realised with even greater immediacy in Mark-Anthony Turnage’s song cycle When I Woke, where the exceptional Roderick Williams brought insight and richness of tone to every line. His gentle incantation of the final Lie Still, Sleep Becalmed was particularly beautiful, and Llewellyn handled the melancholic instrumental colours with great care.

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