Roderick Williams - defeating cultural apartheid in Lieder, Wigmore Hall

Roderick Williams sings Schumann Frauen-Liebe und Leben at the Wigmore Hall with pianist Joseph Middleton, highlight of an unusual programme Williams calls "Woman's Hour" because it features Lieder that highlight the lives of women.  As Williams says, Lieder aren't necessarily gender-specific, but works of imaginative expression.  So composers and poets were male, but that didn't stop them from caring about how women might think or feel.  The idea that songs should be rigidly classified as male or emale is cultural apartheid, a regressive demeaning of the very values of humanity that Lieder, and indeed the whole Romantic movement, stand for.

Towards the end of the last century, Schumann's Frauen-Liebe und Leben came in for flak from some Lieder fans, thereby ruining it for female singers who risk being attacked for being "anti-feminist" if they like it.  But surely serious Lieder fans should have known better.  Nineteenth century women may not have had equal opportunities but they were human beings with feelings, and even  now, women who chose love and marriage are not traitors to their sex.  Hating Frauen-liebe und Leben says more about the haters than about the music.

Adalbert von Chamisso (1781-1838) was a progressive by the standards of his time, a man of the world and open minded, and a friend of Madame de Staël who was no Handmaid's Tale.  In these poems, Chamisso describes a young woman as she matures and develiops her identity. She becomes strong enough to handle being on her own.  Schumann, too, was not repressive. He knew that Clara was the top celebrity pianist of her time, forging a career without the support of managements and modern PR teams. She'd fought her father in court for the right to marry. Not the sign of a shrinking violet.  She was the breadwinner, continuing to work long after Robert's death. Though neither she nor Robert knew it at the time, Frauen-liebe und Leben was almost prophetic. Schumann's setting is delicate but it's not "effeminate", but rather reflects tenderness and intimacy.

When Matthias Goerne did a programme with  Frauen-liebe und Leben and Wagner's Wesendonck Lieder some audiences went apoplectic, but again that says more about themselves.  It's always easier to hate something different than take it on board.  He did this programme at the Wigmore Hall in 2006 where audiences in general know what Lieder is about and aren't threatened by any deviation from recieived wisdom. He revealed the innate beauty of these works, and the fundamental dignity of human expression.  If Lieder fans (or self styled Lieder fans) can't cope with that,  they desreve to stick with kitsch and schlock.  

Williams and Middleton extended to programme with Lieder by Schubert and Brahms, also portraits of women with feelings and minds of their own, and Clara Schumann's Liebst du um Schönheit, which is pleasant enough but proves the case that some women can decide for themselves where their true talents lie. 

Vaughan Williams : The Song of Love, Albion, Roderick Williams, Kitty Whately

From Albion, The Song of Love featuring songs by Ralph Vaughan Williams, with Kitty Whately, Roderick Williams and pianist William Vann.  Albion is unique, treasured by Vaughan Williams devotees for rarely heard repertoire from the composer's vast output, so don't expect mass market commerical product.  Albion recordings often highlight new perspectives. This  release includes the famous The House of Life, with Kitty Whately, a mezzo-soprano, and songs in German and French, with Roderick Williams, probably the pre-eminent interpreter of English song.

Though the full cycle of The House of Life is now nearly always heard with male voice, even with bass-baritones, the premiere was given at the Wigmore Hall on 2nd December 1904, in the presence of Vaughan Williams himself, with Edith Clegg, a contralto, accompanied by Hamilton Harty. Some of the songs, to sonnets by Dante Gabriel Rossetti,  have texts that suggest a man addressing a woman, such as Love's Minstrels and Heart's Haven, but the others four are gender-neutral. Indeed, Silent Noon, one of the best loved of all Vaughan Williams' songs, lends itself particularly well to the female voice. The warmth in Whately's timbre enhances the image of high summer langour, where "hands lie open in the long fresh grass", the piano gently palpitating.  Whately breathes tenderness into the phrase "All round our nest, far as the eye can pass, are golden kingcups fields with silver edge"  One can almost feel the vista, and endless horizons.  But the "visible silence, still as the hourglass" cannot last. "Deep in the sun-searched growths the dragonfly hangs ......" Dragonflies die, their splendour brief and doomed. Whately's voice seems to hover, making the passionate final declartion ever more poignant. "O! clasp we to our hearts, for deathless dower". The final phrase "the song of love" (hence the album title) can be a little too high for some male voices, but poses no problems for a mezzo-soprano. Though the cycle is The House of Life, the texts deal with Death, often as a strange visitor, as in Death-in-Life, but the overall impact, given the understatement of Vaughan Williams' settings, suggests that happiness, and life, must be cherished while it lasts.

In the Three Old German Songs (1902) Vaughan Williams explored medieval German song, capturing an archaic nature rather different from folk song, German or English.  The setting of To Daffodils on this set comes from a manuscript found at Gunby Hall, which the composer visited regularly. This differs from the 1895 setting of Robert Herrick's poem in that the short lines ebb and flow from quietness to climax, much like Vaughan Williams' Orpheus and His Lute (1903),.  In the Four French Songs, from 1903-4, Vaughan Williams sets medieval French song, Quant li Louseignolz, for example rather than "Quand le Rossignol", a song with connections to knights who took part in the Crusades. Thus the studied "medieval" formality. Roderick Williams has no peer in English song, though his French is less idiomatic, but he's a natural communicator. Here, his delivery brings out the special qualities in these songs, with their stylized formality, very different from folk song and indeed from later French song. There may well be a connection between these songs and Love's Minstrels in The House of Life, with its "modern" take on medievalism.

With Buonaparty (1908) Roderick Willliams is back on home ground, his delivery animated, crackling with character. This is one of Vaughan Williams’ only two settings of Thomas Hardy's poems though, as we know from his Symphony no 9, he knew Hardy's Tess of the d'Ubervilles and the evocations of Wiltshire and Wessex.  Perhaps the composer didn't warm to Hardy's other values. Gerald Finzi, who did understand Hardy's irony and lack of deference, set more Hardy than anyone else. Finzi's setting of Hardy's Rollicum-Rorum quite explicitly satirizes populist war mongering.  Roderick Williams' Finzi settings of Hardy are essential listening, not only for the dynamism of his performances, but for what he reveals of Finzi's feel for Hardy as iconoclast.  RVW's Buonaparty was intended though not used for Hugh the Drover. It's robust, with a jolly refrain, but not specially perceptive.

With The Willow Song (1897), followed by Three Songs from Shakespeare (1925), Kitty Whately sings some of Vaughan Williams’ settings of Shakespeare. This version of Orpheus and His Lute is  almost neo-classical, its refinement more subtle than the better known earlier version.  With The Spanish Ladies (1912) and The Turtle Dove (1919-1934), Roderick Williams returns to classic Vaughan Williams, the first based on a sea shanty, the second on an old ballad collected by the composer from a traditional singer's performance at the Plough Inn, in Sussex in 1904 . These set the context for Two poems by Seumas O'Sullivan,The Twilight People (1905) and A Piper (1908)  published in 1925, when the composer was working on Riders to the Sea. O'Sullivan was the pen name of James Sullivan Starkey, a Dublin journalist. The plaintive lines may reflect Vaughan Williams' knowledge of Ireland, through the prism of W B Yeats and J M Synge.  Whately and Williams conclude with two duets based on German folk songs, in English translation, Think of me and Adieu.  Though Albion recordings cater to a very specialized market, this set is very well planned and performed : a good introduction for those wanting to delve deeper into Ralph Vaughan Williams and the sources of his inspiration.

Hubert Parry English Lyrics vol 2 SOMM

New from SOMM recordings, the second volume from Hubert Parry's English Lyrics.   Between 1874 and 1918, Parry wrote 74 songs in twelve collections, all titled "English Lyrics", two sets of which were published after his death.   As Jeremy Dibble writes,"The generic title of English Lyrics symbolized more than purely the setting of English poetry (but) also an artistic manifesto and advocacy of the English tongue as a force for musical creativity shaped by the language's inherent accent, syntax, scansion, and assonance".   German and French composers were quick to recognize how poetry could develop art song, and even set a great deal of Shakespeare (in translation and adaptation). Parry's interest in English lyrics opened new frontiers for British music.  The prosperity of late Victorian and early Edwardian London  fuelled the growth of audiences with sophisticated tastes, many of whom travelled and were up to date with music in mainland Europe. The splendid art nouveau interior of the Wigmore Hall attests to this golden age.  Until 1914, it was the Bechstein Hall, connected to the Bechstein piano company who supplied pianos - and European music - to audiences beyond the choral society/oratorio market.  

The first SOMM volume of Parry English Lyrics focused on settings of Shakespeare, Herrick, Beaumont and Fletcher, Sidney et al (Please read more here).  In this second volume, the emphasis is on poets of the 19th century, some of whom were "modern", ie contemporaries of Parry himself.  A thoughtful choice, for this reinforces the connection to art song in Europe.  Parry's setting of Percy Bysshe Shelley's O World, O Life, O Time respects the declamatory nature of the poem, well expresssed by Sarah Fox.  There are two settings of Lord Byron When we two were parted and There be none of Beauty's daughters, the latter inspiring a particularly rich piano lovely vocal complemented by a rich piano part, which sets off the crispness in the vocal line, ideal for the distinctive "English tenor" style, highlighting consonants, eliding vowels, sharpening impact.  Not all English tenors are "English tenors" but here we can hear how the style connects to syntax and expressiveness.  In Bright Star!, a setting of John Keats, James Gilchrist rolls his "r's", and breathes into longer phrases like "or else the swoon of death" shaping each word carefully in the line.  Listen to the way he sings "swoon", drawing out the vowel, the sound of which is echoed by the piano, played by Andrew West.  In Dream Pedlary, (If there were dreams to sell) to a poem by Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Gilchrist's voice curls around the words, adding magical frisson.

Harry Plunket Greene who was to become Parry's son-in-law, premiered many of Parry's songs for baritone.  Perhaps Parry created these songs for Plunket Greene's agile voice and down-to-earth delivery.  It's certainly no surprise that Roderick Williams is easily the finest baritone in  English song, since he sings with a natural directness which communicates almost as if singer and listener were in conversation, which is ideal for English song, where the floridness of, say, an Italianate style would not work.  Also, his voice is not pitched too low, but lends itself to flexiblity and brightness, which suits the English syntax.  It's almost impossible to know English song without having heard Williams, whose experience in this field is unequalled.  Compare Williams in two songs: Thomas Ford's And yet I love her till I die, an early 17th century air, and Love is a bable, a quasi-folk song.  In the first Williams is correct and courtly, in the second, his innate warmth adds sincerity to the wry humour in the song.   In Parry's two settings of poems by George Meredith, Marian and Dirge in the Woods, Williams captures the rollicking, open air energy in the songs. In What part of dread Eternity?, to a text which may be Parry's own, Williams's voice darkens forcefully, taking on the solemn tone of the poem. 

This recording includes the whole ninth set of Parry's English Lyrics, (1908) settings of seven songs by Mary Coleridge (1861-1907).  If the poems are fairly slight, Parry's treatment makes the most of what Jeremy Dibble has called their  "lack of ostentation".  The songs are simple but dignified homilies. Sarah Fox sings them with lucid purity, reflecting their almost Brahmsian reserve.  Elsewhere on this recording,  she sings lyrical pieces like Proud Maisie (Walter Scott) and A Welsh Lullaby (John Ceiriog Hughes), a poet popular in 19th century Wales.

Celebrating English Song Roderick Williams SOMM

"Celebrating English Song" new from SOMM recordings with Roderick Williams, with Susie Allan, pianist.   George Butterworth's Six Song from a Shropshire lad, Gerald Finzi's Let us Garlands Bring and songs by John Ireland, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Ivor Gurney, Warlock, Moeran, Quilter and Benjamin Britten.

Roderick Williams transformed English song with his gift for natural, direct communication.   He's one of the finest champions of the genre, ever.  Yet his legacy hasn't been preserved on recording at the level that it should be. It's scattered over many different labels, with varying production standards.  Often, the more specialized the repertoire, the finer the standards.. So thanks to SOMM for this recording, a fine sampler, pitched for listeners new to the genre, as suggested by the rather basic liner notes. Some choices, however, are more esoteric and ought to be flagged up for more attention

Butterworth's Six Songs from a Shropshire Lad is basic repertoire, which Williams has performed many times. His recording from 2010 with Ian Burnside is one which most fans of English song will already have in their collections.  Gerald Finzi's Let us Garlands Bring is another Williams staple, which he first recorded some twelve years ago.  It's good, though, to have recent performances in high-quality sound. The four songs by John Ireland, Great Things, In Boyhood, Youth's Spring Tribute and the iconic Sea Fever, also appeared on Williams’s recording from 2008, and the Vaughan Williams songs, Silent Noon and The Vagabond, also have earlier incarnations. Nontheless, it is good to hear recent performances, in good sound quality. As Williams's voice matures, it hasn't lost its unaffected freshness. In every new performance, the music lives, afresh.

Williams has long been associated with Ian Venables, so the two Venables songs, A Kiss and Flying Crooked, are a very welcome inclusion in this set.  A Kiss, from 1992, when Venables was in his 30's, is a setting of a Poem by Thomas Hardy that shows the influence of Gerald Finzi in its fidelity to text. Finzi set more Hardy poems than most, and Venables was closely involved in Finzi circles. Flying Crooked, to a poem by Robert Graves, is altogether more individual. It's a model of concise expressiveness.  In just over one minute, Venables replicates the "honest idiocy of flight" that is the movement of  a butterfly that "lurches here and here by guess/and god and hope and hopelessness".  Like the butterfly, the music doesn't fly straight but flips about capriciously. A wonderful sense of  freedom in the dancing notes in the piano part, executed with great delicacy by Susie Allan. The vocal part's a challenge, too. Williams’s voice soars and flutters playfully on the word "aerobatic".  Wonderfully cheeky, and refreshing. This recording should have new listeners rushing for Williams's recording of Venable's The Song of the Severn, or indeed Williams's Severn & Somme collection (also with Susie Allan) for SOMM in 2006, so good that it's still a classic.   

That's why this SOMM release is so worthwhile. It connects the mainstream of English song to modern development.  Benjamin Britten's The Salley Gardens is a variant of a very old song indeed, as is The Ploughboy, but listen to how wittily Britten incorporates Schubert into the song.   The  rhythms suggest the ploughboy's physical energy but also hint at the manic nature of the lad's ambition.  Ploughboy, politician and crook !  Allan's top notes fly as the pedal pounds bumptiously.  The song also demonstrates how Williams can inject personality into his singing. As he sings "Whatever's good for me, sir, I never will oppose", his voice darkens.  For a brief moment the ploughboy is revealing his true, venal self, behind the mock-merry cheekiness.  In a similar vein, Peter Warlock's miniature, Jilian of Berry, where jolly melody hides deceit. The barmaid is generous, but her customers are cheats. Given Warlock's own propensity for drink and mischief , the song has deeper levels.

Three Ivor Gurney songs here, Black Stitchel, Lights Out and Captain Stratton's Fancy. illustrate a side of Ivor Gurney that has somewhat been obscured by the emphasis on his service in the war and its aftermath.   Edward Thomas's mud-stained manuscript for his poem Light's Out lies in the Imperial War Museum, since Thomas was killed at Arras a hundred years ago, but both poem and song are about much more than war.   "I have come to the borders of sleep, .....where all must lose their way, however straight....." Thomas’s syntax curls  past the lines as they lie on the page, tracing a wayward path which Gurney follows, with great sensitivity.  Something is coming to an end. Thus the minor key. and long, curving lines which Williams defines beautifully.  But where does the future, lie, if it exists? Gurney builds brief pauses after each phrase.  "To go into the unknown, ....I must enter...and leave...alone". The song ends, hovering, without resolution.   In contrast, Captain Stratton's Fancy, which connects to the vigorously upbeat mood of Sea Fever (both texts by John Masefield)  to The Vagabond and indeed to the boisterous Jilian of Berry.  The piano part marches, while Williams sings with mock heroism. "like an old bold mate of Henry Morgan".  Dutch courage?  Another song which displays Williams’s ability to be at once funny and profound. 

Howard Skempton - The Rime of the Ancient Mariner NMC Roderick Williams

Another hit for NMC, specialists in modern British music: Howard Skempton The Rime of the Ancient Mariner with Roderick Williams and the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, conducted by Martyn Brabbins. This recording breaks new ground, its appeal reaching beyond  new-music circles.

Samuel Taylor  Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner intrigues because there's nothing else quite like it in English verse. Though its tone suggests ancient saga, its subject was unequivocally modern, in the sense that it caught the Zeitgeist of the Romantic era's fascination with the "Gothic". The Mariner breaks unspoken  rules and kills the Albatross. He and his shipmates are cursed, dying of thirst though there's "water, water everywhere" around them.  Two centuries later, the Rime still haunts. The Mariner's journey is a descent into the darker unconscious. Like the wedding guest, we "fear thee, ancient Mariner! I fear thy skinny hand!"

Howard Skempton's setting grows from the ballad so symbiotically it seems a "living thing". The vocal part reflects the strange obsessive nature of the text, which draws the listener in as if hypnotized.  The cadences rise upwards and down, at a pace which suggests a hard march. Coleridge began the poem while hiking on the moors.  Roderick Williams is a remarkable narrator, capturing the demented undercurrents in the verse. The lines run like a form of Sprechstimme, not recitation, yet not quite singing. This nightmare does not let a voice take full flight. Williams has a gift for natural, direct communication, without theatrical histrionics. He makes us sympathetic to the Mariner as a mortal man, which makes his fate all the more tragic.

The voice is accompanied at first only by the cello, legato drawn drone-like, as if it were some ancient, primitive instrument, or, indeed, a force of nature, like a sinister wail.  The cello carries the music for a while, until other voices join in in subtle combinations. The double bass quietly murmurs, suggesting sinister depths.  The viola leads the violins, an aptly quirky reverse of "natural order". When the ship is becalmed -- "As idle as a painted ship/Upon a painted ocean" -- the music hovers almost imperceptibly, as if listening out for a breeze. When things change, the piano and other players create a tumult.  When the visionary figures appear, the high violins at last take flight.  Coleridge  writes movement into his lines, which Skempton translates into abstract sound.  We listen, as if spellbound, to the strange, unworldly atmosphere.  Maurice and Sheila Millward, who suggested the setting and commissioned the piece, had insight. Skempton's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is a remarkable work which needs to become part of the canon of British music.

Like an earworm, this music burrows into your subconciousness.  The cadences in the text haunt the music, reflecting, perhaps, the tides of the ocean, and the pulse of the human body.  You're mesmerized, absorbing the surreal atmosphere so it seems almost natural. Though you're hypnotized, almost against your will, you keep listening, fascinated by the detail and inventiveness concealed within the relentless pulse.  The wedding guest must have felt the same way! It's a tribute to Skempton's skill that his music adds greatly to the effect of the poetry, enhancing its effects without overwhelming its strange personality.


On this disc, Skempton's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is paired with Only the Sound Remains, taking as a starting point an idea from Edward Thomas's The Mill Water.   The mill is gone, and its sounds have fallen still.  Yet "In calm moonlight, Gloom infinite, The sound comes surging in upon the sense:".  Thus there's no need here for a voice part: the orchestral sounds evoke the sounds that once might have been heard, though the men and machines who made them are now long gone.  John Fallas's booklet notes for NMC explain further. "Skempton's pervasive but pervasively disguised/transformed nine-note scales are the secret code generating everything, from the spare, angular counterpoint into dramatic minor chords or sudden outbreaks of warm, major key consonance". The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in particular is a tour de force, not at all easy to perform, so treasure this recording. It will become a classic.

NMC Brian Elias Electra Mourns

At the Wigmore Hall, Brian Elias's Oboe Quintet coincided with the release of a new recording of Elias's work from NMC Records, specialists in modern British music.

The title piece, Electra Mourns, won Elias a British Composer Award. It received its premiere in 2012, with the Britten Sinfonia, conducted by Clark Rundell, with soloists Susan Bickley and Nicholas Daniel  for whom the piece was created. .  Electra mourns is a dramatic scena, with the stylized formality of Greek tragedy. Electra is alone, without hope, in hostile circumstances.   Bickley sings the long, keening lines expressing Electra's desolation. But Orestes is not actually dead. Daniel's cor anglais surrounds the vocal part, mimicking its curving lines. Voice and instrument in duet are heard against a backdrop of strings, punctuated by piano.  Functioning like Greek chorus, the orchestra comments, wordlessly, sharp angular outbursts suggesting alarm. High textures sear, like flailing whips.  Yet the cor anglais continues, unperturbed, its sensuous richness evoking elusive mysteries.   When the strings go still, its chords grow strong and clear. Electra listens.  Bickley's voice intones at the bottom of her range, then soars.    


Electra Mourns is enhanced by Geranos, from 1985, here performed by Psappha, conducted by Nicholas Kok, who first performed it in 2003. Both pieces take their cue from Greek legend but take on different form. Geranos is tightly constructed and taut, evoking the idea of dance as athletic discipline. The slow middle movement refers to a ritual dance of mourning.  The puzzles and mazes of Harrison Birtwistle naturally spring to mind, but Elias's style  is his own.  Sparkling textures (piccolo, strings, metallic percussion) illuminate the third and final movement.  Theseus was said to have danced on escaping the Labyrinth. Geranos ends with lucid, clear tones. A "geranos" is a crane, flying free.  

While  the texts for Meet Me in the Green Glen are by John Clare (1793-1864), Elias's setting is minimal, almost "Grecian".  Roderick Williams and Susan Bickley sing without accompaniment, their plaintive lines evoking timeless plainchant rather than quasi-folk song.  The unadorned beauty of the singing is enhanced by a slight echo effect, as if the recording was made in a silent chamber.  Perhaps the "Green Glen" is a tomb-like time warp. The poems refer to the past, to "Now" and"Hesperus, thy twinkling bray" that "tolls the traveller on his way that Earth shall be forgiven".  A fascinating mix of quiet and disquiet, utterly modern in spirit.  .

The five songs of Meet Me in the Green Glen (2009)  are followed by the five songs of Once I did breathe another's breath  for low voice and piano, premiered by Roderick Williams and Iain Burnside at the Ludlow English Song Weekend in 2012.  The texts are more disparate, and the cycle less coherent.  Ludlow began as a tribute to Gerald Finzi whose  affinity for Tudor and Stuart poetry few can match.  Roderick Williams, nonetheless, is superlative, with such a gift for communication that anything he sings is well worth listening to.   Electra Mourns is the third of NMC's Brian Elias recordings, and a good addition to the catalogue of British music.  

C H Sorley A Swift Radiant Morning - Roderick Williams

Roderick Williams and Susie Allan  gave the world premiere of A Swift Radiant Morning commissioned for theThree Choirs Festival. Listen here, because it's an interesting work that extends the canon of British song. "A swift radiant morning" aptly describes Charles Hamilton Sorley, a young man of outstanding promise, killed by a sniper at Loos, seven months short of his 21st birthday.  At that age, few fulfil their potential, but  C H Sorley must have been quite a personality.  In this photo he stares at the camera without flinching, unfazed by the knowledge that he was going to war.  We can see why Sorley's father said "he looked upon the world with clear eyes , and the surface did not deceive him".
 
Sorley was in Trier when war was declared in 1914. On his return to England, he did his duty and joined the Suffolk Regiment . Yet in his poem To Germany, he writes of war with maturity way beyond his years. The poem is worth reading because it shows his inner strength. He could resist the hate games around him.  This lucid intelligence marks him out as a person with vision. Notice too his direct, yet highly distinctive, way with words. How he would have relished the freedoms of the 1920's and 1930's. Many good poets were destroyed by war - Wilfred Owen, Edward Thomas, Isaac Rosenberg and Ivor Gurney, but John Masefield said that Sorley was the greatest loss.

In A Swift Radiant Morning, Rhian Samuel (b 1944) sets two poems and four texts by Sorley, which has a bearing on her musical conception. Sorley left only 37 complete poems, but a large body of letters. They make fascinating reading, since Sorley was an acute observer and processed ideas with great originality.  Here's a link to the full collection of letters published in 1916. Letters are like a conversation, where one party speaks and the other responds. The voice leads, but the piano comments, unobtrusively. Sorley's texts are so expressive that the piano can't quite compete, but that's no demerit.  Samuel respects Sorley's syntax and turns of phrase, editing the longer texts with sensitivity.    Roderick Williams is an ideal interpreter, since he has the uncanny ability to make what he sings feel personal and direct. A natural match for CH Sorley !  At times, Samuel forces the voice above its natural range. Williams manages extremely well, but I wonder if this cycle could be transposed for tenor.  A Swift Radiant Morning is a well-crafted, sensitive work which deserves attention, and not just because the subject himself was so singular. I've subscribed to a source which features a lot of Rhian Samuel's work. Lots worth listening to.

At Hereford, Roderick Williams and Susie Allan also did Tim Torry's The Face of Grief (2003) to poems by Charlotte Mew (1869-1928) but the setting is minimal and the poems not  in the same league as Sorley's.  Please also read my piece on the rest of Roderick Williams's  recital, which highlighted Elgar's Sea Pictures, in the piano version, transposed for baritone. 

Male Elgar Sea Pictures : Roderick Williams Three Choirs Festival

At the Three Choirs Festival in Hereford last year,  Elgar and Ralph Vaughan Williams, but with typical flair, Roderick Williams and Susie Allan  presented them with a difference.  Listen here on BBC Radio 3

Williams started with RVW Four Last Songs. Divest oneself of notions of  Richard Strauss.  RVW's songs aren't nearly such masterpieces,  but a loose compilation of ideas left unfinished upon the composer's death. Procris is based on a poem by Ursula Vaughan Williams, Menelaus on the Odyssey. The last two last poems are more personal .The contemplative mood of Tired suggests a man assessing his past without rancour, and Hands, eyes and heart suggests inward, private emotions. Stylistically, they connect more to very early RVW, even pre-Ravel RVW, than to his finest works, but are still worth hearing, especially for English song specialists. I first heard them from the Ludlow English Song Weekend in May 2015.

Elgar is an essential feature of the Three Choirs Festival, which this year takes place in Gloucester.  But large-scale Elgar, rarely Elgar piano song.  Again, Roderick Williams to the rescue ! Elgar's  Sea Pictures  is usually heard with full orchestra, though Elgar himself transcribed the piano song version, and played it privately.  Elgar's art songs  are somewhat eclipsed by the fame of RVW, Quilter, Butterworth et al,  for in many ways they hark back to an earlier era.

Sea Pictures, however, was conceived with grand orchestral flourish, so this version is rather more than Elgar's other songs for voice and piano. Sea Pictures is also mezzo and contralto territory, so hearing it with a baritone makes it even more unusual.  Most of us are imprinted with memories of Janet Baker singing  "Yet, I the mother mild, hush thee, O my child" but the mother figure in the poem fades as the vision of Elfin Land emerges. The lower tessitura suits the last strophes, where  "Sea sounds, like violins"  lead the descent into slumber.  The maritime references in Sabbath Morning at Sea become more prominent: most sailors in Elgar's time were male, after all. The piano part in this song is distinctively Elgarian.  When RW sings "He shall assist me to look higher", you can almost feel the ship's sails billow in the wind.  A male voice works best with The Swimmer and its muscular, athletic swagger: very macho.  A pity that the BBC miked the piano too closely. When I heard Williams sing Sea Pictures in recital at the Oxford Lieder Festival with  Andrew West  five years ago, the balance was much more natural.

Coming up soon, from the same concert last year, two settings of texts by lesser-known poets of the First World War.  Rhian Samuel's A Swift Radiant Morning, (2015)  a setting of five poems by Charles Hamilton Sorley, a Marlborough man who died, aged only 20, at the Battle of Loos in October 1915 and Tim Torry's The Voice of Grief (2003), settings of Charlotte Mew (1869-1928)

Roderick Williams, BCMG Wigmore Hall - New Songs to English Poetry

At the Wigmore Hall, the London premiere of a major new work by Howard Skempton, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, with Roderick Williams and BCMG, the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group.

Samuel Taylor  Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner intrigues because there's nothing quite like it in English verse. Though its tone suggests ancient saga, its subject was unequivocally modern, in the sense it caught the Zeitgeist of the Romantic era's fascination with the "Gothic". The Mariner breaks unspoken  rules and kills the Albatross. He and his shipmates are cursed, dying of thirst though there's "water, water everywhere" around them.  Two centuries later, the Rime still haunts. The Mariner's journey is a descent into the darker unconscious. Like the wedding guest, we "fear thee, ancient Mariner ! I fear they skinny hand!"

Howard Skempton's setting grows from the ballad, so symbiotically it seems a "living thing". The vocal part reflects the strange obsessive nature of the text which draws the listener in as if hypnotized.  The cadences rise upwards and down, at a pace which suggests a hard march. Coleridge began the poem while hiking on the moors.  Roderick Williams is a remarkable narrator, capturing the demented undercurrents in the verse. The lines run like a form of Sprechstimme, not recitation, yet not quite singing. This nightmare does not let a voice take full flight. Williams has a gift for natural, direct communication, without theatrical histrionics. He makes us sympathetic to the Mariner as a mortal man, which makes his fate all the more tragic.

The voice is accompanied at first only by the cello (Ulrich Heinen), legato drawn drone-like, as if it were some ancient, primitive instrument, or, indeed, a force of nature, like a sinister wail.  The cello carries the music for a while, until other voices join in in subtle combinations. The double bass (John Tattersdill) quietly murmurs, suggesting sinister depths.  The viola (Christopher Yates) leads the violins. When the ship is becalmed -- "As idle as a painted ship/Upon a painted ocean" -- the music hovers almost imperceptibly, as if listening out for a breeze. When things change, the piano (Malcolm Wilson) and other players create a tumult.  When the visionary figures appear, the high violins at last take flight.  Coleridge  writes movement into his lines, which Skempton translates into abstract sound.  We listen, as if spellbound to the strange, unworldly atmosphere.  Maurice and Sheila Millward, who suggested the setting and commissioned the piece, had insight. Skempton's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is a remarkable work which needs to become part of the canon of British music.

The BCMG Wigmore Hall concert began with  Dominic  Muldowney's An English Songbook (2011) with a new song, "Smooth between the Sea and Land", a BCMG commission receiving its London premiere. This song is a setting of A E Housman, and reflects the poet's distinctive timbre, which stands out in contrast to the three settings of W H Auden, whose arch sophistication demands music of equal bite. Muldowney;'s "At Last the Secret is Out"  and "Funeral Blues" reflect Auden's verbal intelligence, Yet when Roderick Williams sang "Stop the clocks.....", one could feel the sensitivity which Auden concealed behind his combative, cynical surface.

Songs to poems by Edward Thomas  and John Betjeman bridged the divide between Auden and Housman,  with Muldowney creating a  nice, almost bluesy feel as if shadowing the spirit of the 1920's.  Muldowney responds even better to Shakespeare. His version of "Winter " nips along, as if skidding on ice. "tu-whit, tu-who, a merry note", sharply  manic. Finest of all, Muldowney's "Fear no more the Heat of the Sun".  This song is the heart of the cycle, connecting to "Funeral Blues" and "Winter", but also in mood to the other songs in the group. It's a wonderful song, at once elegaic, yet tender. With Skempton and Muldowney, the art of English Song is alive and well.

This review  appears in Opera Today

Hubert Parry English Lyrics - the English language in song

From Somm Recordings, the first of a projected series of songs by Hubert Parry: Twelve Sets of English Lyrics and other songs. This series could lead to a re-evaluation of the development of English art song. The generic title English Lyrics symbolized, writes Jeremy Dibble in his excellent notes, "...an artistic manifesto and advocacy of the English tongue as a force for musical creativity, shaped by the language's inherent accent, syntax, scansion and assonance". (Read Dibble's book on Parry HERE)  In short an approach to singing in English distinct from the British choral tradition. After unification, the German economy prospered so rapidly that it became a major, and global,  competitor with the British Empire. Parry's approach thus mirrors the growth of German Lieder. Why not art song based on great English poetry?  While Stanford set approximations of folk poetry and Elizabethan verse, Parry went for the most challenging. Fourteen of the 30 songs in this volume are settings of Shakespeare. Others include texts by Robert Herrick, Beaumont and Fletcher, Philip Sidney  et al.

Parry's songs are sophisticated art song, far removed from Victorian parlour song or even folksong, with which English song is so often associated, rather ironically since Britain industrialized earlier and more thoroughly than the rest of Europe.  Written between 1874 and 1918, Parry's English Lyrics herald the work of later composers, like Roger Quilter and Gerald Finzi. Parry's knowledge of Shakespeare's plays enhances his settings. The plaintive delicacy of Willow, willow, willow suggests Desdemona's innocence: she doesn't know what's coming but feels distressed and expresses herself in child-like song.  O mistress mine is livelier, even the notes tripping bright and agile. Parry's When icicles hang by the wall sparkles. Short phrases crackle, the way frost makes the sense tingle. The refrain "Tuwitt ! tuwhoo !" seems embedded, wordlessly, in the piano part. This sprightliness also reinforces the contrast between the images of cold and cosy comfort. "When blood is nipt and ways be foul", good folk go about their daily tasks, tending the fire and cooking. A perceptive  setting which challenges Purcell.

Parry responds to No longer mourn for me when i am dead, a setting of Sonnet 71 with great sensitivity.  The sonnet is dignified, but deep emotion breaks through. Parry emphasizes the words "for I love you so" soaring out of the longer phrase in the poem. The piano introduces a firmer mood. From "Oh, if I say, you look upon this verse", Parry's lines stretch as if they could reach out into the future, defying time.

The first set of Shakespeare songs are followed by songs that reflect Parry's appreciation of different poetic styles. To Jocasta on going to the wars and To Althea, from prison, both to texts by Richard Lovelace, blend poise with confidence. ""Stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage".  To mark the change in mood, a change in singer. James Gilchrist and Susan Gritton sang the first songs, Roderick Williams most of the next ten. This balance between voices creates further contrast. Williams's direct style is extremely effective in songs like On a time the amorous Silvy Follow a shadow, an altogether more graceful setting of a poem by Ben Jonson, then Ye little birds that sit and sing (Thomas Heywood) where Parry writes brisk bird-like trills which Williams carries off with aplomb.

 Finest of all, To Julia (Robert Herrick) where the ease in Williams's voice lets the sensuality in the song flow pointedly yet discreetly.  Susan Gritton sings two more Herrick settings, and Gilchrist sings Rosaline (Thomas Lodge) with its charming refrain "Heigh ho, fair Rosaline!", soaring up the register at the end with impassioned verve. Under the Greewood Tree, the vigorous, jaunty lines sung by Williams with evident pleasure.  Then Shakespeare with a twist. If Germans could set Shakespeare in translation, so could Parry. It's interesting to compare Parry's "German" Shakespeare to his English Shakespeare.. The piano parts take on greater prominence, as if Parry were remembering Schumann.  To further mark the difference, Gilchrist sang in the English Tenor style, though he normally sings German quite idiomatically.  The English Tenor style is partly based on class pronunciation and on the choral tradition where individual voices have to cut through the voices around them. Hence the crisp articulation of consonants, and the precision of delivery. The very finest English tenors can add great depth to German song - think Bostridge's performances of Henze. With this recording, where Parry addresses the sound of English syntax, we can learn to appreciate the unique quality of the English language in song.

Roderick Williams Finzi Ludlow English Song Weekend

Two hardy perennials of the English song tradition, Roderick Williams and the English Song Weekend broadcast on BBC Radio 3. The English Song Weekend — how I wish that I could have been in Ludlow to hear it live. At this time of the year, Shropshire is at its most beautiful, verdant with fresh growth and vigour.  The English Song Weekend, founded by JIm Page and the Finzi Friends in 2001, is a festival like no other. Everyone knows each other and welcomes those who share their love for English song, old and new. That was a Finzi principle, embracing the joys of the language, nature and abundant joy. Ludlow itself isn't, strictly speaking, part of the English music heartland, but fits the atmosphere perfectly. It's a lovely old market town which symbolizes so much of what makes England, and the quintessential Englishness of English song.

"When smoke stood up from Ludlow,
And mist blew off from Teme,
And blithe afield to ploughing
Against the morning beam
I strode beside my team",

Ivor Gurney, the poet, and also composer, was a townie who probably never drove a plough. Gerald Finzi was the English Gentleman, so perfect he could have been conjured up by Hollywood Casting, yet was very much an outsider by birth. Ralph Vaughan Williams may have been born in Down Ampney but resolutely spent his life in London. Even A E Housman's visions of Shropshire grew from the imagination rather than from lived rural experience. But that's exactly why I love English song. Dreams of "blue remember'd hills" and "the Land of Lost Content" evoke deep and deliciously complex instincts.  A kind of universal Sensucht, as Germans would say.

Roderick Williams is easily the best exponent of English song, ever. His direct, conversational style  communicates meaning without artifice or condescension. In real life, he's as posh as they come, but his personal warmth and intelligence transcend stereotypes. I shall never forget his Last Night of the Proms, where he eschewed cheap gimmicks for Rule, Britannia, and instead chose sincerity, idealism and conviction.  His eyes shone. No jokiness, but absolute faith in meaning  For me, one of the great things about Britain is that anyone can become somebody, hard as it might be. That's what inclusiveness is really all about. I once had the pleasure of telling a UKIP worthy that I, too, am an immigrant.

Williams began his recital with early Vaughan Williams, so early that the relative clumsiness of the settings makes one glad he went to France and found his voice via Ravel.  In contrast, Williams did RVW's Four Last Songs. Divest oneself of notions of  Richard Strauss.  RVW's songs aren't valedictory, but a loose compilation of ideas left unfinished upon the composer's death. Procris is based on a poem by Ursula Vaughan Williams, Menelaus on the Odyssey. the two last poems are more personal .The contemplative mood of Tired suggests a man assessing his past without rancour, and Hands, eyes and heart suggests inward, private emotions. Stylistically, they connect more to early RVW than to his great masterpieces, but reminded me how people in old age revert to their youth.

Williams and Burnside separated early and late RVW with Robert Saxton's Time and the Seasons, which premiered at the Oxford Lieder Festival in 2013, the best Lieder festival in this country.  With its "starlight" minimalism, and delicacy, this set of songs consciously evoked Gerald Finzi for me, specifically the transformational last strophe of Finzi's Channel Firing: when, after the big guns fall silent, "As far inland as Stourton Tower, And Camelot, and starlit Stonehenge.". The words aren't grammatic, but the music suggests that the meaning goes far beyond mere words. In the silence of the stars, we are at one with something primeval and magical : the soul of England no less, connecting to ancient mysteries.

In honour of Gerald Finzi and his ideals, and of Jim Page, without whose vision the English Song Weekend might not have come about, Williams concluded with Finzi's great song cycle Before and After Summer. Williams has sung them very often. For a change, especially piquant for an audience who knows him and Finzi practically by heart, Williams adopted a gentle Dorset burr, not too heavy or too intrusive, but just enough to remind us that the poems, by Thomas Hardy, are far more sophisticated than pseudo rural pastiche. Finzi's settings  bring out their philosophical depths and symbolism. Again, a reason why English song holds such a very special place in the English cultural psyche. Not bucolic at all! 

Flowers of the Field - Gurney Finzi Butterworth RVW

"As for man, his days are like grass; As a flower of the field, so he flourishes", so goes Psalm 103. This new recording, Flowers of the Field  connects composers affected by the 1914-1918 war, but it's real significance lies in its featuring the world premiere recording of Ivor Gurney's The Trumpet and of Gerald Finzi's Requiem de Camera. 

Ivor Gurney was gassed at Passchendaele, and spent the last 20 years of his life in and out of mental  hospitals. The Trumpet was written in 1921 but remained unpublished and unperformed until 2007. Here we hear the edition reconstructed by Gurney scholar Philip Lancaster with full orchestration, which received its Three Choirs Festival premiere in 2010, which I was privileged to attend.  Read Philip Lancaster on the genesis of the piece HERE.  Gurney used a poem by Edward Thomas, killed in Arras in 1917, whose work he had set previously. The song begins with a resolute "Rise up! Rise up!", the City of London choir singing as one voice with forceful attack. It's a curious poem. Does the trumpet  refer to the trumpet of modern battle or to the trumpet that marks the beginning of the End of Time in the book of Revelation? Gurney emphasizes the word "Scatters" in the phrase "as the trumpet blowing scatters the dreams of Man".  Unlit stars, dew and the traces of lovers must be scattered in this strange new dawn. Percussion pounds, and the full orchestra surges. The choir cries out, unequivocally "Scatter it, Scatter it!". The clarity of the setting reflects the image of  "that clear horn"  and "the air that has washed  the eyes of the stars". No maudlin sentimentality here, but clear-sighted fervour. "Arise! Arise!" the choir sings. After Armageddon, the past will be erased, the dead will rise from their graves in a new era of hope.

Strictly speaking, the premiere recording of Gerald Finzi's Requiem de Camera was conducted by Richard Hickox nearly ten years ago, but in a different  performing edition by Philip Thomas, made in 1990. This version is edited and completed by Christian Alexander. Hilary Davan Wetton conducts the London Mozart Players with idiomatic depth.  The Reqiuem de Camera (1924) is an ambitious piece in  four sections. An orchestral prelude leads to an extended choral setting of a poem by John Masefield  "How still this quiet cornfield is tonight". The text doesn't explicitly mention context, but the original poem was titled August 1914. Although this is very early Finzi, we can already hear how he would go on to be influenced by images of English landscape and history, and the passage of time.  Wetton, who has conducted a great deal of English choral music, gets the City of London Choir to sing with nicely hushed tones: silence is of the essence.  The same mood of timelessness prevails in the section for baritone (Roderick Williams) and orchestra: "Only a man harrowing clods".  Finzi dedicated the work to Ernest Farrar, his tutor, who was killed on the Somme in 1918, but I think it's a mistake to overstate the idea that the Requiem connects musically to Butterworth or to Gurney (whom Finzi championed). It is far more relevant to assess its relevance to Finzi's own later work, and to his songs and choral pieces. It's not as sophisticated as Intimations of Immortality, but contains, in germ, the spirit of Finzi's future greatness.

On this disc we can hear Butterworth's A Shropshire Lad – Rhapsody for Orchestra and, more of a rarity, the complete Ralph Vaughan Williams An Oxford Elegy, with Jeremy Irons as narrator. The Oxford Elegy is based on a poem by Matthew Arnold about a scholar who runs away to learn from gypsies.  He could be any man who disdains academia for real life experience: I don't think we should make too much of its connection to Oxonians who went to war, since it was written 1946-9 in the wake of a much more gruesome war.  Oddly enough, its connection to George Butterworth isn't mentioned in the booklet notes, a surprising omission in a compilation based on 1914-18. Butterworth and Vaughan Williams were so close that RVW might have not developed as he did without the influence of Butterworth, who pushed RVW creatively, and for whom RVW dedicated his Symphony no 2 "London" in 1913.

Please see my numerous other posts on Gurney, Finzi, Butterworth and RVW (use labels below)

The mystery of George Butterworth

Roderick Williams sang George Butterworth Songs from A Shropshire Lad at tonight's BBC Prom 41 at the Royal Albert Hall. Williams is by far the best best British song specialist around. He has such a warm. conversational style which makes his singing direct and personal. (Read more here) .For my review of the Lest We Forget Prom read here).

The photo at right show George Butterworth  in civilian days. Read Michael Barlow's biography "Whom the Gods Love," (more here)  It's good, given the sparsity of source material. Butterworth was a very private person, and shielded himself from such things as prying historians. There are so many mysteries. Why did he destroy his unpublished music when he went to the front? There are no Butterworth descendants any more - George and his only male cousin died without issue. So perhaps we could  use modern intuition and reflect.

Butterworth's father's archives are in Oxford, but they're not completely reliable because they were compiled by a man who loved his son dearly but probably didn't understand his complexities any more than he understood military procedure. After reading Barlow's book I went to the War Office Archives to read regimental documents. Shock! No "Butterworth" listed!  However, being a good archivist, I think like a detective. I found the original war diary kept by the commanding officer of Butterworth's unit, where each day's events were written as they happened, sometimes in pencil.  I found the actual record of Butterworth's death. Read my account "George Butterworth in the trenches" . I also found his original medal citations by searching under his third forename, Kaye. Somehow, by accident or design, he had been listed as Kaye-Butterworth rather than Butterworth when he signed up.

Finding the war diary is easy enough because British officers' records are extensively documented. But that started another mystery. His fellow soldiers didn't even know he was a musician.  He wasn't actively hiding anything because the army contacted his father after his death. But one wonders who Butterworth might really have been. An Oxford don, on seeing the student Butterworth with a friend, remarked that they were two of the "reddest" revolutionaries in Britain.

Why was Butterworth keen to keep his lives as soldier and composer apart? Was he gay, or conflicted about his father's remarriage ?  By the standards of his time, A E Housman was about as much out of the closet as was possible. The poems in his collection of A Shropshire Lad are heavily homo-erotic. Obviously, orientation doesn't dictate art. The very hetero Ralph Vaughan Williams's On Wenlock Edge is based on Housman's poems too.  But one wonders what Butterworth might have achieved had he not been killed so young. Would he have stayed in the Cecil Sharp fold  with its repressive neo-fascist style? Would he have found a creative breakthrough like RVW? RVW adored him. His  London Symphony was inspired by Butterworth, who pushed RVW towards symphonic writing.  Even Carlos Kleiber liked Butterworth's orchestral music. We shall never know what Butterworth might have achieved,  but I suspect we shouldn't assume that Butterworth was "simply" a writer of folk-inspired songs and pastorals.

Birtwistle - Yan Tan Tethera, Barbican

 

Latest in the Barbican's Birtwistle at 80 celebration, Harrison Birtwistle's Yan Tan Tethera, from 1984. For a change titles like "A Mechanical Pastoral"  add to meaning. The piece is "pastoral", a rumination on folk traditions which date from before Christian times. Whatever period these shepherds may live in, they connect intimately with an ancient landscape. Yet Birtwistle's music is constructed with mathematical precision. Perhaps he's suggesting clocks, as he has done elsewhere, alluding to Time itself, operating on many different levels at once.  Geological layers, layers of language, repetitive layers and interconnections in the score.  Yan Tan Tethera is a maze in music, like the mysteries that might lie beneath the sarsen stones and prehistoric burial mounds.

The narrative is extremely simple. Just as in a medieval mystery play the characters are symbols, not characters in themselves but links to cosmic truths. In theatre history, the idea of psychological character development is very recent indeed.  Alan (Roderick Williams) comes from the northlands, Caleb Raven is a Wiltshire man, who pokes the ground, looking for buried treasure. "I wave to him but he never waves back" sings Williams. Caleb Raven (Omar Ebrahim) doesn't like immigrants. His name itself hints at Cain and Abel, his surname sinister and his abode the mound of Adam. Alan came south against his will, driven by the sound of an invisible piper who is also the Bad 'Un, ie, a Satanic figure (Daniel Norman). Alan starts off with two sheep, who multiply to a large flock: Alan's wife Hannah (Claire Booth) gives birth to twins who mysteriously multiply while Alan is imprisoned under the earth by Caleb Raven, jealous of his good fortune.

Mathematical puzzles in the music, too - diabolic triads and triplet, repeated patterns that vary in sequence.  Baldur Brönnimann, a new-music specialist, conducts with unsentimental lucidity. Waffle isn't Birtwistle's thing. (Shame about the poor unsigned programme notes.) The very title "Yan Tan Tethera" refers to archaic methods of counting and measurement. so accuracy is of the essence.The Britten Sinfonia and the Britten Sinfonia Voices responded well to Brönnimann's tight phrasing. "Pastoral" in Birtwistle's case doesn't mean dreamy, but earthy and gritty. John Lloyd Davies' semi-staging. employed the image of sarsens, standing on flat plains. Now they stand immobile, but once they were transported from far away. In a piece like this, "singing" doesn't mean elaborate coloratura, but solid pitch and down to earth diction. Roderick Williams is perhaps the best baritone in English repertoire in this country, and Omar Ebrahim the best for avant garde (though Williams sings a lot of new music). Together the pair were ideal counterparts, two opposing poles, like the landscape they occupy in the score. .More on Birtwistle on this site than most anywhere. please explore.

Photo (top): Roger Thomas

Three Choirs Festival Worcester 2014

Tickets go on sale 15/4 for the 2014 Three Choirs Festival, this year in Worcester, the city where Elgar grew up. This is also the first year the Festival has been curated by Dr Peter Nardone. Moreover, this year marks the centenary of the beginning of the First World War. The Three Choirs Festival mirrors a type of Englishness that has survived centuries of strife and change. Perhaps we can better appreciate that "Spirit of England" by engaging with The Three Choirs Festival and what it represents.

This year's Three Choirs opens on Saturday 26th July. Perhaps the Opening Service at 11.30 in Worcester Cathedral will mean more than usual, given what is being commemorated. You don't have to be a Christian to care. We all share (I trust) universal faith in goodness, humanity and hope. At 2.30,  Roderick Williams, easily the greatest baritone in this genre, presents a recital on The Great War in English Song, built around George Butterworth's A Shropshire Lad. Butterworth was killed in the Somme in 1916. There's a lot about him on this site, including something I found in the War Office archives which no one had found before. Please use the "Butterworth" label at right.

This year, London's Globe Theatre  tours to Worcester: a very special event indeed. The Globe will be doing Shakespeare Much Ado About Nothing at 3.30 in the College Hall. T.hen, at 745 in Worcester Cathedral itself, Britten's War Requiem. Britten wasn't a Three Choirs regular, and the piece isn't conventionally religious. Please read what I've written about the War Requiem, Britten and Britten's pacifism on this site, using the labels at right. If ever there was an occasion when the Three Choirs ethic and Britten dovetail, this will be it. This War Requiem could be a coming-together on a very deep level.

Many concerts during Sunday 27th. Alternatively, you could visit Elgar's Birtthplace at Broadheath three  miles from the city centre. Excellent museum, with very well stocked CD shop. There will be other opportunities to visit during the week, and specially curated Walking Tours through the countryside Elgar was so fond of visiting. Sunday night will be a good chance to savour Three Choirs hospitality at the King's Hall - Roast Beef and Yorkshire pudding! After which one will be well fortified for Dvořák’s Stabat Mater in Worcester Cathedral, which Dvořák himself conducted at the Three Choirs Festival in 1884. The Choirs was very much in the vanguard of "new" European music when it was new.

This tradition continues: On Thursday, 31/7 in Worcester Cathedral, Torsten Rasch A Foreign Field will receive its premiere. It's a Three Choirs commission,  and will be heard with Elgar's The Spirit of England and Vaughan Williams' A Lark Ascending. The concert, titled Reflections of 1914, will be another significant coming-together. Two of the greatest British composers, responding to a war that would change their world, and a youngish German composer who has travelled the world, reflecting on what went before him.  Rasch grew up in a tradition very close to the Three Choirs: he was a boy chorister with the Dresdener Kreuzchor, which produced Peter Schreier and Rudolf Mausberger (lots about them on this site too). Rasch's music embraces wider genres. He emigrated to Japan as a young man and has worked in theatre, film and multi media.  Read more about him here.

But without Elgar, no Three Choirs Festival would be complete. This year's Elgar highlight will be The Apostles, on Friday,1st August in Worcester Cathedral. This is a hugely ambitious, even extravagant work and should be stunning with the massed choirs. Good cast, too : Andrew Kennedy, Brindley Sherratt, Sarah Fox, Claudia Huckle, Neal Davis, Marcus Farnsworth, conducted by Adrian Partington. This week  BBC Radio 3 is broadcasting Mark Elder's Proms Apostles which I wrote about here. The photo shows Elgar conducting The Apostles in Worcester at the 1905 Three Choirs Festival. Don't recognize the organ? The performance took place in The Public Hall, Worcester, demolished in 1966 when the city centre was rebuilt. .

Smash Hit - Elgar, London Coliseum

On Monday, 11th June 1917, at what was then a music hall and is now the London Coliseum, Edward Elgar's Fringes of the Fleet received its premiere. Smash hit! Initially part of a Variety performance that repeated twice daily - imagine - the songs proved so popular that the run was extended week after week, and the show toured, returning to London at the end of the year.

Elgar used texts from Rudyard Kipling's best-selling poems. The songs are robustly vivid and good enough as pure music that they work better than many of Elgar's other art songs for piano. A hundred years ago, there wasn't any prejudice against crossover like there is now. Modern music snobs don't know music history.  Fringes of the Fleet was performed with full staging and special effects. The photos above and at right show the singers in their costumes seated "at a seaside pub" as they begin their recital of maritime shanties. The Lowestoft Boat describes a herring boat commandeered for the war effort. The crew aren't sailors! The mate was a vicar in a chapel in Wales, more used to top hat and tails, and the engineer is 58, "so he's prepared to meet his fate"

"A game is more than the player of the game and the ship is more than the crew", the refrain in Fate's Discourtesy sums up the mentality of the era, when war seemed like a jolly jaunt. In  Submarines (Kipling's Tin Fish), the four baritones sing long lines near the bottom of their register, like a submarines lurking "in the belly of Death". New technology and surprisingly "new" sounding music, making the most of the unusual four-man ensemble. Best of all, I think,  Sweepers (Kipling's Minesweepers) . Mines have been reported in the fairway, and ships are bottled up in port. The minesweepers are heroes. Hence the chorus, using their names, "Unity, Claribel, Assyrian, Stormcock, and Golden Gain". Rather a mouthful to sing, but carried off with style.

Elgar's Fringes of the Fleet was so popular that a recording was rushed out in early July 1917, three weeks  after the first performance. The singers were Charles Mott, Frederick Henry, Frederick Stewart and Harry Barratt,.On July 23, Charles Mott, the lead, who had sung Wagner at Covent Garden, was called up. He was killed in battle in May 1918. Elgar himself conducted - he was an early advocate of new media. The definitive recording is the recent SOMM disc, with other Elgar rarities  The edition used is by Tom Higgins, who conducts the Guildford Symphony. (more here). The 1917 recording is now available commercially here or here and serves as an interesting example of how vocal styles have changed.  How rigid the phrasing seems now, as if the singers were old men in young bodies. In the earlier Lowestoft Boat, the singers hammed up the sound of dogs barking at the dog's home where the ships cook worked as a civilian. It's cute, but Roderick Williams and his sturdy crew (Nicholas Lester, Duncan Rock, Laurence Meikle) have the musical nous to sing better without losing the sense of adventure.

First Night of the BBC Proms 2013

The First Night of the BBC Proms 2013 marks the start of summer. At the Royal Albert Hall, Sakari Oramo, new Chief Conductor of the BBCSO, captured the sense of anticipation. Seldom does Benjamin Britten's Four Sea Interludes get a performance as vivacious as this.  And why not? We all know the piece and its origins in Peter Grimes. So it's good to hear it as a stand-alone celebration of the sea, of wide open horizons : freedom, exhilaration,  adventure. Of course we know what happens to Peter Grimes and his boys, and that the opera is grim. But for a moment we can think ourselves back to 1948 and feel the excitement. Peter Grimes was the "dawn" of modern British opera, and Oramo's bright, optimistic "Dawn" movement sparkled with hope and light. The high violins and flutes suggested soaring seagulls, and the lower strings and brass evoked the swell of the tides. The distinctive clarinet danced, like phosphoresence on waves. Then, woodwinds and brass suggested, well, "wind", stirring, heralding change. Grimes dies, but the sea renews itself with every wave and tide.

"In ceaseless motion comes and goes the tide Flowing it fills the channel broad and wide Then back to sea with strong majestic sweep It rolls in ebb yet terrible and deep".

Stephen Hough was the soloist in Rachmaninov's Variations on a Theme of Paginini. Hough is a Proms regular. I like the maturity of his playing, and his sense of assertiveness, qualities we value on an occasion like The First Night of the Proms. Hearing Rachmaninov after The Four Sea Interludes made me think of the many, fleeting moods of the sea. Hough's hands flew across they keyboard . In my imagination, images of change, energy and renewal. And perhaps, even the image of Paganini, the violinist, remade by Rachmaninov the pianist, and yet again by Witold Lutoslawski the composer. Lutoslawski's Variations  were new to me and thrilling. The familair basics are there,  but this time rejuvenated with a quirky, irreverent flamboyance. Paganini, who sold his soul to the Devil? Hough had been confident before : now he was almost demonic, pulling the orchestra in his wake.

For Ralph Vaughan Williams, A Sea Symphony marked more than a first symphony. (Note it's title "A" symphony, anticipating one of many). RVW lived in London and The Home Counties, unlike Britten who lived literally on the beach at Crag House in Aldeburgh. For RVW, the idea of the seas may have stimulated ideas of voyages of the imagination,  an expanded "Songs of Travel" for nearly 500 voices. It spurred – to use a bad pun – a sea change in his writing. He was making a transition from the safe world of Parry and Stanford into the great unknown. “Behold, the sea itself” could be an allegory for a young composer launching himself into uncharted waters.

RVW's  A Sea Symphony is an extravagant spectacular, ideally suited to the grand treatment it can get at the BBC Proms. A rousing, powerful performance. Roderick Williams sang the baritone part to perfection. His style is direct, almost conversational, yet carries thrust and authority without "period" ponderousness. If anything, he was even better in the quiet second movement "Alone on the Beach" than in the fairly truculent "public" first movement with its reference to imperial power. Even in the cavernous Royal Albert Hall, Williams could convey intimacy and colour. In the turbulent third movement, "The Waves", choirs came to the fore. Oramo's not a specially demonstrative conductor, but he could get the orchestra to deliver on a magnificent scale. You can hear why he was so popular with the CBSO in Birmingham during the Elgar centenary.

Oddly, the mystical final movement "The Explorers" evokes Elgar at his most spiritual. Solo violin, solo viola, solo horn, and Roderick Williams singing at the top of his register, quietly and with hushed reverence, awed by the power of God and of Nature. "O farther sail", Williams, the choirs and Sally Matthews the soprano repeat. The last chords of the orchestra fade slowly, suggesting distance and movement. We are on the way "Toward an Unknown Region".

As so often on The First Night of the Proms, the Prom opened with an extract from a larger work in progress by a leading British composer. This year, Julian Anderson's Harmony, a four minute choral work which may prove interesting on further hearing.

Here's a link to my Proms overview. Usually I listen to and write about 30- 40 Proms a season, so please come back for more.
And look at the SECRET TWINS - Roderick Williams and Benjamin Britten !
 photo:  Yuichi from Morioka, Japan

ENO Sunken Garden Michel van der Aa

Michel van der Aa's Sunken Garden had its world premiere at the Barbican Theatre, under the auspices of the ENO.  Van der Aa is a well-respected artist, closely associated with the Nederlandse Opera.  His Up Close, presented together with Pierre Audi's Liebestod in 2011, won a Gravemeyer award. Sunken Garden is a huge leap ahead from Up Close, and also from the earlier After Life (reviewed here), also presented at the Barbican and in Amsterdam. Sunken Garden is altogether more ambitious, and successfully achieves van der Aa's dreams of linking different art forms to create a Gesammstkunstwerk for the age of technology.  It will divide opinion, however, as anything truly experimental usually does.

Much will be made of its technological inventiveness, but don't be distracted. At heart, Sunken Garden is a true opera in the deepest sense.  It's about people and how they communicate, or don't communicate. As human beings we don't communicate in any one way, but on multiple levels, consciously or unconsciously. We absorb data from all sources.  What matters is how we process that information.  Thus van der Aa, his librettist David Mitchell and his visual effects team create a multi-level, multi-dimensional whole from which we take as much as we can. 

We could remain on the surface, like Portia Jacquemain (what a name!). She runs an art gallery but is not an artist. She spouts babble because she can't cope with real communication. We can stop there and snigger. But van der Aa is making a wry joke. Jacquemain ( played by Caroline Jay) is shallow. She's estranged from her daughter Amber who seems to make a mess of her life but engages with the world around her, and with the artist Toby Kramer, admirably played by Roderick Williams. Kramer composes with video, in much the way that a composer assembles notes to make music. Like Amber, he cares about people, and wants to find out what's happened to his subject Simon Vines (Jonathan McGovern).  Significantly, Zenna Briggs (Katherine Manley) morphs from persona to persona. She starts off as a wealthy patron of the arts, but drops Kramer when he starts getting too close to the truth. It turns out that she's not a patron of the arts at all but a sinister figure who, vampire-like, lives off the psyches of people who think and feel for themselves.

Don't be distracted by the complex plot. Think of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. Nothing seems to make sense, yet there's a crazy sense of momentum, such as one finds in dreams. Like Alice, Kramer descends into a sunken garden hidden below the flyover. Suddenly everything glows in surreal, unnatural colour. The 3D effects aren't a gimmick but an intelligent theatrical commentary. We're in a psychedelic dream where everything is more real and more false. You can escape by taking off the 3D glasses, but how flat things seem in comparison. Even if you can't follow the narrative, seeing the water from the "vertical pond" implode and explode is great theatre. Some of the most effective scenes are fairly straightforward, such as the shots of Roderick Williams against a flat background with diagonal beams.

The technological special effects are themselves a comment on the way we communicate. Kramer films. Amber texts. Jaquemain chatters. In After Life, van der Aa used clips of real people talking and spliced them with scripted film.  In Sunken Garden, he uses actors whose speech is peppered with inconsequentials. But that's exactly how "real" people speak. The ums and ahs of conversation are part of the process of communication, and of formulating ideas. If we look more closely to these "people" we begin to notice that they, too, are as unnatural as the 3D scenery in the garden. Toby Kramer clearly isn't American, despite his talk of Omaha. Sadaqat Dastani (Stephen Henry) is also a caricature. Mental hospitals aren't that luxurious.  And since when did landladies like Rita Wales (Alwyne Taylor) dress in cashmere and pearls and live in National Trust gardens? Sadaqat is supposed to be insane but he identifies Amber's drawings of the sunken garden and points Kramer to Iris Marinus, the "doctor". It's a gorgeous role for Claron McFadden, who, like Roderick Williams, helped create After Life. She's good at being over the top. He's good at being matter of fact.

Zenna Briggs morphs from persona to persona, til her true malevolent nature is exposed. Katherine Manley sings the difficult part well. Amber (Kate Miller-Heidke) is in real life an indie star who can sing though not with Manley's range. She's not what she seems either. Her hair, make-up and clothes are so unnatural that they're playing roles as well.

Van  der Aa's music is very expressive, much more direct and visceral than, say, George Benjamin's Written on Skin (reviewed here). He worked with Louis Andriessen, for whom communication was paramount. Andriessen, for example, was involved with political music theatre where he tried to challenge the normal hierarchy of performance. The sung and spoken text is often unclear. There are no subtitles. You have to struggle to -ollow what's happening in Sunken Garden, but  that's the whole point. As in real life, nothing is clear cut. You have to listen to the music, and assemble all the information in this opera in your own mind. It helps a lot that the conductor  was André de Ridder, one of the best new music specialists in Europe, who understands the multi dimensional levels in this tightly constructed score.  

Van der Aa's Sunken Garden is so different that it would be a miracle if everyone could respond to it in the same way. But perhaps the secret is to enter its strange world on its own terms.In the real world, we communicate in many different ways other than through words alone. We listen to all kinds of verbal and non-verbal signals, and we use visual and subconscious images. Sunken Garden is good opera because it transports us into an artist's vision and makes us engage with our feelings. Or not, if we prefer. 

Full review in Opera Today.