But his songs – there are over eighty rom·nsy,
as they are known in Russian – are increasingly well-known among audiences,
and this ‘Rachmaninov Drama’, curated by Julius Drake and performed by the
pianist, baritone Roderick Williams and soprano Sofia Fomina at Middle
Temple Hall showed why they deserve to be heard and admired, confirming as
they do Rachmaninov’s skill as a Romantic melodist, as a crafter of
emotional drama and as a virtuosic pianist.
The sequence of twenty-four songs was performed in alternation by the
singers, often with the songs running segue, creating an on-going
‘dialogue’ and sustaining a dramatic fluency as we journeyed through tales
of love unrequited, fulfilled and lost, of love’s illusions and finally
love’s regrets. Though they are, in general, fairly brief and follow a
similar method, the songs offer diversity of mood and meaning, and there
were peaks of emotional tension, moments of lyric reflection and occasional
folk-like whimsy.
Sofia Fomina immediately established an emotional sound world, opening the
programme with ‘The soldier’s wife’, a folk-style lament in which a woman
regrets her marriage to an orphan who has been in the army for twenty-five
years, leaving her without family and home, an outsider in her village.
Fomina used her powerful lyric soprano, emotive vibrato and rich array of
colour to create a mood of great pathos. In ‘At My Window’ the passions
expressed were more ecstatic as her soprano rose confidently to the melodic
peaks; ‘A passing breeze’ was more ruminative, as Fomina held back,
painting an evocative picture of a dark ocean soon to be richly illumined
by the regenerative sunrise.
The impassioned joy she conjured in ‘Spring Torrents’ – “Spring comes,
spring comes!” – brought a warm smile to the face of Roderick Williams,
seated to the side. In contrast, ‘There is a small island’ Op.14/2 – the
text of which was credited in the programme as being by Konstantin Balmont,
when in fact it is a translation by the Russian poet of a lyric poem by
Percy Bysshe Shelley – was dreamy and wistful: as sort of musical paysage in which Fomina’s initial light-voiced declamatory
reflections on the luxuriant verdure of the island gave way to increasingly
more defined melodic shapes, reaching down to the voice’s lower register,
conjuring the mystery and serenity of the sleeping, dreaming isle.
The early Op.8 set of songs concludes with a lengthy melodrama, ‘Prayer’ –
Alexei Plescheyev’s translation of a text by Goethe – in which Fomina found
fervour and intensity, as she expressed the guilt and torment of a woman
who, having rebuffed a young man’s innocent love, now regrets the coldness
which has resulted in his death and begs God’s forgiveness. The ending was
magical, as the voice trailed up and away in a heaven-bound plea, “Hear my
sinful prayer,/For I am wounded in my soul”, which was answered by three
quiet, ambiguous piano chords.
Sometimes translated as ‘The Quest’, ‘A-oo’ made for a striking opening to
the second half of the recital, with its hyperbolic metaphors and titular
phrase – the calling-cry you make when you’ve lost track of your beloved
when you’re wandering in the mountains. Fomina beautifully declared the
lovers’ passion to be like that of a flower that, at noon, “lights the
candle of another flower”. This song is one of the six Op.38 songs, in
which the relative simplicity of the early songs has given way to a more
complex medium, inspired by the symbolist poetry, and complemented by the
tumultuous intricacies of the piano part with its extensive, extravagant
postlude.
Fomina may have had an advantage over Roderick Williams, singing as she was
in her mother tongue, but the baritone communicated with no less immediacy
and honesty, his beautifully appealing voice speaking with unaffected
sincerity and finely defined feeling. There was ardency and forthrightness
in ‘I was with her’ Op.14/4, the final declaration of eternal unity with
the beloved’s soul rising with strength and dignity. ‘Ah, never sing to me
again’ Op.4/4 closed in bittersweet quietude, the sombre mood underpinned
by the piano’s dark ostinato and low-lying counterpoint, as the
poet-narrator spurned memories and melodies of “sorrowful Georgia” which
recalled “Another life and a distant shore”.
Perhaps we missed a little ‘Russian colour’ in the more folk-like songs,
such as ‘She is as fair as noon’ Op.14/9, with its lilting ripple in the
accompaniment and lamenting sentiments. But, this was more than compensated
for by Williams skilful control of line and structure. ‘How fair this place
is’ Op.21/7, which Williams sang seated, rose beautifully at the close, as
the poet-narrator lost himself in immersive reflections on “God – and I,
Flowers, and an ageing pine./And you, my dream!”, the pianissimo fermata seeming to balance on the cusp of a reality which might
dissolve into dream.
The extended monologue ‘Fate’ Op.21/2 was a wonderfully compelling drama of
great rhetorical impact, in which the eponymous figure of destiny stalked
the protagonist “with her walking crutch and sombre eyes”, constantly
niggling him, “Tap, tap, tap”. Aleksei Apukhtin subtitled his poem ‘On
Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony’, intimating that the opening notes of the
symphony signify Fate knocking at Beethoven’s door; whatever the truth or
otherwise of that belief, Williams’ performance was ‘symphonic’ in stature
and gripping in its theatrical and vocal immediacy.
The recital closed with Rachmaninov’s only song for two voices, though ‘Two
Voices’ is less a ‘duet’ and more a ‘duologue’ as soprano and baritone sing
separately, exchanging their short declamatory phrases back and forth. The
man opens the song, enquiring of a young girl about the two men who had
courted her, now that she has lost them both. Her replies tell of her
emotional innocence, growth and ultimate regret, and though at times
light-hearted the song had a conclusive sadness and sombreness: “Who shall
you remember in your heart, my lovely one?” asked Williams; “I feel pity
for the first, but I shall love the latter!” replied Fomina, her voice
retreating quietly as she herself left the platform. She was to return,
though, for a postscript: the ‘Letter to K.S. Stanislavsky from S.
Rachmaninov’, one of twelve songs which were remained unpublished by
Rachmaninov.
Throughout the recital, Julius Drake’s accompaniments were sure, sensitive
and skilfully shaped. Whether sparse or complex, the piano’s contributions
were eloquent but supportive, never distracting from and always
complementing the voices. Small ‘echoes’ of the vocal lines made their
mark, unobtrusively but pointedly; moods were etched evocatively – the
wistful chains of chords at the close of ‘There is a small island’ and the
tender piano postlude in ‘The sounds are many’ Op.26/1 were particularly
moving.
Rachmaninov began his creative life as a composer of song, prompted by his
love of poetry – that by his contemporaries Balmont, Severianin, and
Brussof who exercised a strong intellectual and creative influence during
the late nineteenth-century, as well as the work of earlier poets such as
Pushkin, Lermontov, Merejkovsky, A. Tolstoy and Zhukovsky. He published his
first songs in 1873; his last, the Six Songs Op.38 appeared in 1916, though
these were followed by two ‘sacred songs’, the pencil sketches of which he
gave to Nina Koshetz and which were subsequently presented to the Library
of Congress in 1970 and published three years later.
The fall of the Romanov dynasty in February 1917 disrupted Russian concert
life and forced Rachmaninov to look for employment outside his native land.
A concert tour of the Scandinavian countries was followed by several
invitations to travel to the US – including one to become conductor of the
Boston Symphony Orchestra, which he turned down – and in November 1918 he
sailed from Oslo to New York. Thus began a new life as a concert pianist,
performing up to seventy concerts a year in major cities such as Boston and
New York, but also in smaller towns such as Davenport, Asheville, Syracuse
– just about anywhere (as Richard D. Sylvester tells us in his 2014 Companion to the complete songs) where there was a suitable venue
where Steinway could deliver and tune a piano.
From this time, after twenty-six years as a composer of rom ·nsy, there were to be no more songs from Rachmaninov’s
pen. Perhaps he felt that his songs, which so powerfully expressed the
spirit of his homeland, needed a Russian audience. If so, he was mistaken.
Though the Russian texts may place the songs at one remove, a committed and
consummate performance can make their emotions and life-spirit immediate,
real and compelling, as the audience members at Middle Temple Hall
discovered, to their great pleasure.
Claire Seymour
Sofia Fomina (soprano), Roderick Williams (baritone), Julius Drake (piano)
‘The soldier’s wife’, ‘I was with her, ‘At my window’, ‘Ah, never sing to
me again’, ‘A ring’, ‘She is as fair as noon’, ‘A passing breeze’, ‘How
fair this place is!’, ‘Spring torrents’, ‘Oh no, I beg you, forsake me
not’, ‘Night is sorrowful’, ‘In the silence of the night’, ‘Dissonance’,
‘A-oo!’, ‘Fate’, ‘There is a small island’, ‘The sounds are many’,
‘Lilacs’, ‘Song of the disenchanted’, ‘A prayer’, ‘You knew him’, ‘When
yesterday we met’, ‘Fragment from A. Musset’, ‘Two partings’, ‘P.S.: Letter
to K.S. Stanislavsky from S. Rachmaninov’
Middle Temple Hall, London; Thursday 4th July 2019.
image=http://www.operatoday.com/Roderick-Williams-2-Groves-Artists.jpg
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product_title=A Rachmaninov Drama: Middle Temple Hall, Temple Song Series
product_by=A review by Claire Seymour
product_id=Above: Roderick Williams (baritone)
Photo courtesy of Groves Artists