The Sixteen continues its exploration of Henry Purcell’s Welcome Songs for Charles II. As with Robert King’s pioneering Purcell series begun over thirty years ago for Hyperion, Harry Christophers is recording two Welcome Songs per disc.
In February this year, Albanian soprano Ermonela Jaho made a highly lauded debut recital at Wigmore Hall - a concert which both celebrated Opera Rara’s 50th anniversary and honoured the career of the Italian soprano Rosina Storchio (1872-1945), the star of verismo who created the title roles in Leoncavallo’s La bohème and Zazà, Mascagni’s Lodoletta and Puccini’s Madama Butterfly.
Collapsology. Or, perhaps we should use the French word ‘Collapsologie’ because this is a transdisciplinary idea pretty much advocated by a series of French theorists - and apparently, mostly French theorists. It in essence focuses on the imminent collapse of modern society and all its layers - a series of escalating crises on a global scale: environmental, economic, geopolitical, governmental; the list is extensive.
Amongst an avalanche of new Mahler recordings appearing at the moment (Das Lied von der Erde seems to be the most favoured, with three) this 1991 Mahler Second from the 2nd Kassel MahlerFest is one of the more interesting releases.
If there is one myth, it seems believed by some people today, that probably needs shattering it is that post-war recordings or performances of Wagner operas were always of exceptional quality. This 1949 Hamburg Tristan und Isolde is one of those recordings - though quite who is to blame for its many problems takes quite some unearthing.
The voices of six women composers are celebrated by baritone Jeremy Huw Williams and soprano Yunah Lee on this characteristically ambitious and valuable release by Lontano Records Ltd (Lorelt).
As Paul Spicer, conductor of the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire Chamber Choir, observes, the worship of the Blessed Virgin Mary is as ‘old as Christianity itself’, and programmes devoted to settings of texts which venerate the Virgin Mary are commonplace.
Ethel Smyth’s last large-scale work, written in 1930 by the then 72-year-old composer who was increasingly afflicted and depressed by her worsening deafness, was The Prison – a ‘symphony’ for soprano and bass-baritone soloists, chorus and orchestra.
‘Hamilton Harty is Irish to the core, but he is not a musical nationalist.’
‘After silence, that which comes closest to expressing the inexpressible is music.’ Aldous Huxley’s words have inspired VOCES8’s new disc, After Silence, a ‘double album in four chapters’ which marks the ensemble’s 15th anniversary.
A song-cycle is a narrative, a journey, not necessarily literal or linear, but one which carries performer and listener through time and across an emotional terrain. Through complement and contrast, poetry and music crystallise diverse sentiments and somehow cohere variability into an aesthetic unity.
One of the nicest things about being lucky enough to enjoy opera, music and theatre, week in week out, in London’s fringe theatres, music conservatoires, and international concert halls and opera houses, is the opportunity to encounter striking performances by young talented musicians and then watch with pleasure as they fulfil those sparks of promise.
“It’s forbidden, and where’s the art in that?”
Dublin-born John F. Larchet (1884-1967) might well be described as the father of post-Independence Irish music, given the immense influenced that he had upon Irish musical life during the first half of the 20th century - as a composer, musician, administrator and teacher.
The English Civil War is raging. The daughter of a Puritan aristocrat has fallen in love with the son of a Royalist supporter of the House of Stuart. Will love triumph over political expediency and religious dogma?
Beethoven Symphony no 9 (the Choral Symphony) in D minor, Op. 125, and the Choral Fantasy in C minor, Op. 80 with soloist Kristian Bezuidenhout, Pablo Heras-Casado conducting the Freiburger Barockorchester, new from Harmonia Mundi.
A Louise Brooks look-a-like, in bobbed black wig and floor-sweeping leather trench-coat, cheeks purple-rouged and eyes shadowed in black, Barbara Hannigan issues taut gestures which elicit fire-cracker punch from the Mahler Chamber Orchestra.
‘Signor Piatti in a fantasia on themes from Beatrice di Tenda had also his triumph. Difficulties, declared to be insuperable, were vanquished by him with consummate skill and precision. He certainly is amazing, his tone magnificent, and his style excellent. His resources appear to be inexhaustible; and altogether for variety, it is the greatest specimen of violoncello playing that has been heard in this country.’
Baritone Roderick Williams seems to have been a pretty constant ‘companion’, on my laptop screen and through my stereo speakers, during the past few ‘lock-down’ months.
Melodramas can be a difficult genre for composers. Before Richard Strauss’s Enoch Arden the concept of the melodrama was its compact size – Weber’s Wolf’s Glen scene in Der Freischütz, Georg Benda’s Ariadne auf Naxos and Medea or even Leonore’s grave scene in Beethoven’s Fidelio.
I doubt that this recital disc, recorded in 2004, could have been intended as a memorial to Arne Dorumsgaard, who died in March of 2006, but the composer’s centrality to the program, and the poetic themes of death, sleep, and mortality that recur in the Elizabethan texts, enable such an interpretation.
The recital’s actual theme is Elizabethan poetry as set by British composers of the period or of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, all performed by tenor Robert Bracey and pianist Andrew Harley. The final 15 minutes of the 70-minute program are given over to a performance of Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Four Hymns for Tenor, Piano and Viola, where they are joined by a fellow member of the University of North Carolina faculty, violist Scott Rawls.
Within the vocal music world, Dorumsgaard is best known for his 22-volume Canzone Scordate, sensitive arrangements for voice and piano of a wide variety of songs that would not otherwise be available to artists in vocal-piano recitals: European folk songs, old songs in French, Italian, and German, as well as the songs on this disc, most of which were originally lute songs by Elizabethan-period composers John Dowland, John Bartlet, and John Attey. Other artists who have recorded his arrangements include Frederica von Stade and Gerard Souzay, as well as Kirsten Flagstad, who recorded a recital of Dorumsgaard’s original songs in Norwegian along with a selection of his arrangements. (The best source of information on him that I have found online is his obituary.)
The present disc begins with five settings of Elizabethan poetry by Roger Quilter, whose skillful settings of the texts and interesting but unobtrusive accompaniments draw us in and introduce three texts that we will hear again later in the program: Shakespeare’s “O Mistress Mine” and “Come away death”, and the anonymous “Weep you no more”, all of which intertwine the themes of love and death, through grief for the beloved, grief for oneself at being scorned by the beloved, or an exhortation to love now as death will come soon enough.
This set is followed by a generous selection of Dorumsgaard’s arrangements. As the tunes, if not the arrangements, are contemporary with the poetry itself, this section gives a taste of the musical environment in which the poets wrote the texts. The difficulty I have with this section is that there is insufficient contrast among the songs to keep my interest engaged all the way through. With the exception of the minute given over to the energetic “What thing is love?” the music is fairly languid. There are ten English lute song arrangements available in the Canzone Scordate; the artists present six here, then wisely follow with Dorumsgaard’s arrangement of Thomas Arne’s eighteenth-century setting of Shakespeare’s “Come away death”, which adds some stylistic contrast and eases the transition toward the more modern music.
We re-enter the twentieth century with Eric Thiman’s “The Silver Swan”, a bird whose song in dying makes the statement “More Geese than Swans now live—more fools than wise”, which is curmudgeonly but perhaps fitting as a follow-up to the work of Dorumsgaard, who gave up original composition and devoted himself to arrangements of earlier music. As if to emphasize the contrast between the earlier era and the present, the next song is Gustav Holst’s “Weep you no more”, a text heard twice before as set by Quilter and Dowland, but noticeably different from either in Holst’s Wagner-influenced harmonies. The Germanic influence continues into Ivor Gurney’s delicately lush setting of “Sleep”, a text which reappears two songs later in an equally fine setting by Peter Warlock, who counted among his many musical influences both Roger Quilter and the music of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods. Thus it is fitting that the Elizabethan-inspired section of the program closes with several more of Warlock’s songs to Elizabethan texts, finishing with the lively “As ever I saw”.
By this point in the program, we have spent about 55 minutes hearing a variety of musical styles unified by the poetry of a single glorious era in English literature. Bracey sings the songs in an engaged but straightforward style that doesn’t vary in color much beyond a consistently ringing timbre that grew a bit tiring for this listener after a while. But when the sonic landscape opens out with the addition of the viola and the more triumphant, extroverted music of Vaughan Williams’ 4 Hymns, Bracey comes into his own. According to the CD booklet, he won first prize in the Oratorio Society of New York’s Annual International Solo Competition in 2002, and his skill with that style of music translates well to this piece, which opens with the two instruments playing at full volume and the voice cutting through as a triumphant recitative. In the more meditative second and third songs, the warmth of the viola brings out a warmth in Bracey’s voice which, if it was there, was not as pronounced earlier in the recital, when it would have been welcome. An echo of the triumph of the first song is heard in the concluding “Evening Hymn” with its evocative ground bass in the piano part of the first and last verses of the voice, continuing under the viola’s postlude that gradually fades into quiet as evening falls.
The booklet includes texts of the songs and notes on the composers represented in the program, as well as biographies of the artists and publication information on the songs.
Barbara Miller