The Lighthouse is so gripping in the theatre that one fears some of that quality will be lost on a sound-only recording. In the first scene in fact the reverse is true. In the theatre this court of enquiry into the mysterious disappearance of three lighthouse-keepers can be a problem. Its three simultaneous locations (the courtroom, the lighthouse inspection vessel and the abandoned lighthouse itself) are difficult to clarify in the small-scale touring productions that the piece invites. Here, with every word crystal-clear and the music clearly distinguishing not only the three places but their very different moods, the whole scene has great tension and cumulative force. Where you might expect a recording to fall short of a theatrical performance is in the second scene, where the characters of the three keepers are sketched in three brilliant parodies (of a jovial music-hall song, a hearts-and-flowers drawing-room ballad and a revivalist hymn respectively) revealing hidden and darker sides to each character which interact in the oppressively close confinement to induce collective hysteria and suicide. But is that what happens? An epilogue hints that it may not be so, that at least two other solutions to the riddle are possible, and in the mind's theatre both the realistic detail (the rats!) and the ambiguities can be all the more troubling.
I found this latter scene a shade more compelling in the recent staging by Music Theatre Wales (shown on BBC2 television not long ago) and since that company so successfully transferred their earlier production of Maxwell Davies's The Martyrdom of St Magnus to CD (Unicorn-Kanchana, 3/91), I was surprised that this recording features a quite different and rather less pungently characterful cast. Blazes, jocularly revealing his tormented and horrifying youth, culminating in murder and the arrest of his parents for his own crime, should be at the same time terrifying and pitiful: Christopher Keyte sings him strongly, but is neither quite alarming nor quite crazed enough. Neil Mackie's beautiful and delicately inflected tenor gets closer to the 'dark horse' Sandy, and Ian Comboy has the right bullying quality for the bible-bashing Arthur, but his occasional wide vibrato detracts from the force of his last 'hymn', to the Beast that his own sanctimony has conjured up. I'd hate to give the impression, though, that this is an inadequate performance of a work that can haunt you for days: Maxwell Davies's direction is vivid and well-paced, and his instrumentalists are all very fine, as is the dean and wide-ranging recording (a formidably savage weight of tone is drawn from a mere 14 instruments).'