Festival of Song
The Sixth Oxford Lieder Festival, 12-27 October 2007
There are grave linguistic problems in deciding what to name the various language versions of the repertoire of settings for voice and piano of poetry of the romantic and post-romantic periods. By far the biggest collection is the German Lied and there is a regrettable tendency these days to use this word to cover such songs of all nationality. It is at best a loose umbrella description. Fauré wrote mélodies, not Lieder (though there seems to be no single word to describe the French), Rachmaninov wrote romansi, Vaughan Williams wrote songs. Thus the event under review must be regarded pedantically as The Oxford- Lieder Festival, after its organising body, not The Oxford Lieder-Festival after its content. As such it mixed programmes devoted exclusively to the major Lieder-writers with others leavened by different languages and different genres. The overall programme brought into focus that it is differences of language and hence of musical sound as much as differences in sentiment that distinguish the national song.
This was well illustrated by the programmes of the first two concerts, each devoted equally to four composers. The first was given by the baritone Mark Stone with the Festival’s artistic director, Sholto Kynoch, performing Schumann, Mussorgsky, Duparc and Quilter. Stone has a powerful operatic voice which stood him well in Mussorgsky and Duparc (where singer and piano came together gloriously) but he has yet to learn to tone it down to the intimacy of the Lied - there was no piano, indeed little below mezzo forte. Joan Rodgers (with a marvellous pianist Christopher Glynn) made a mistake in choosing to start her programme abruptly with Wolf’s Mörike settings, not really captivating the audience until half way through, with Verborgenheit. Once warmed up, she charmed our minds with Grieg’s six German songs Op.48 (reminding what a great composer of Lieder he is) and then our hearts, in the second half, with Rachmaninov and Shostakovitch.
Undoubtedly, in the star-studded line up for the Festival, the most eagerly awaited were Olaf Bär and James Gilchrist, heard in the fourth and fifth Festivals respectively. Both had to cancel at the last moment due to a virus. Miraculously, Kynoch was able to find replacements of equal calibre, though different personality, who over-rode the audience’s disappointment. (A further miracle was that corrected programmes were available in time!) The tenor Daniel Norman stood in at the last moment for Gilchrist to sing Die Schöne Müllerin, meeting the pianist Anna Tilbrook only at 4.30 in the afternoon before the concert. It was an enthralling performance, with all the heart-stopping moments in place. The pianist appeared to have an over-powerful left hand and tended to lead the singer at moments of excitement – or was it that she just failed to compensate for the bass-heaviness of the Steinway hired for the Festival, noticed on other occasions? Bär was replaced by the young New Zealand soprano Anna Leese, with Kynoch and, to sing the billed Dichterliebe, the baritone Wolfgang Holzmair (tracked down by Richard Stokes on his way to his Austrian sauna) with Julius Drake. Leese sang a selection of Lieder from Mozart to Richard Strauss with great beauty and charm, ending with a divine Morgen. The performance of Dichterliebe was out of this world! Holzmair uses his whole body to enhance the intensity of his feeling for the music and the words; the unity of voice and piano and the attention to detail, such as the timing of the continuity between songs, transmitted to the audience an awe-inspiring experience. While Holzmair’s gestures might now be found a little mannered and old-fashioned, they do demonstrate a dimension that is missed in many performances today.
Sometimes, when Radio3 is playing in the background, a particular performer seizes and holds the attention. Such was the case recently with Katherine Broderick, winner of the 2007 Kathleen Ferrier award. Sensation! She has tremendous, mature personality and engagement with her audience, a secure voice throughout her vocal range (though she needs to watch her vibrato) and a wide dynamic range, capable at its top of blowing the roof off the Music Room – which it nearly did until she wisely turned down her volume. With her pianist Jonathan Beatty, a stylish player providing just the right level of support, she sang an interesting miscellany of Lied, mélodie and song: Brahms (living ZigeunerLieder), Schubert and Clara Schumann in the first half; in the second, I particularly liked Fauré’s Le Papillon et la Fleur, and two other Hugo settings by Wagner and by Bizet. The ecstatic audience departed listing the operatic roles in which they would love to hear her and see her perform.
A Sunday afternoon recital introduced us to one of the few mezzos heard at the Festival. The Dutch Christianne Stoltijn has a beautiful voice with stage presence to match, particularly her heart-warming lower register, which reminded us that the mezzo is the optimal female voice for Lieder (just as it is the baritone for the male). With Julius Drake, she sang Grieg (again), Brahms and Schumann’s dark Andersen Lieder. She ended with a most moving, if slightly light, interpretation of Brahms’ Vier ernste Gesänge. Another mezzo was the Swedish Anna Grevelius, a star of the 2006 Festival with her persuasive singing of Scandinavian songs and now rapidly making her name in both lieder and opera. (She is currently appearing as Nero in ENO’s despicable aquatic travesty of The Coronation of Poppea together with Lucy Crowe, the other star of 2006.) She opened a programme of Wolf with four Mörike settings establishing immediate rapport with the audience. She was then joined by the baritone David Stout in a performance of twenty of the Eichendorff-Lieder. This was a mesmerising performance held together faultlessly by the formidable piano playing of Sholto Kynoch. These songs are not easy listening for those unfamiliar with them, despite a brilliant pre-concert talk by Richard Stokes, which is why, maybe, the performance failed to receive the ovation it deserved. The penultimate evening concert was given by another fine duo, the baritone Stephan Loges with Eugene Asti. We heard Grieg (yet again), Wolf, Ibert, Brahms and Schumann’s Op.39 Liederkreis, a little lacking in the variety we had been led to expect from another excellent Stokes’ pre-concert talk.
The first of four ‘Lunch with Schubert’ recitals, given in association with the Guildhall School by their students, introduced us to a remarkable young pianist Ja Yeon Kang. Her crystal clear technique and phrasing and, in particular, her perfect synchronisation with her singer marked her out as an exceptional new talent in the field of lieder accompaniment. Of the singers of these liederpop concerts, I give thumbnail impressions of those who stood out. Rhona McCail with a charming voice and presence had beautifully controlled crescendi. In the second, Alexander Baker had a fine full baritone voice but needs to make contact with his audience. The third was an intelligently chosen selection of the watery end of the composer’s output, with one of the heavier trout, intelligently sung by Hannah Morrison and a light but dramatic baritone Alexander Duliba.
The fourth Lunch with Schubert recital was, in my opinion, together with Holzmair and Broderick one of the three highlights of the whole Festival. Devoted to Schubert’s Women the youthful soprano Tanya Cooling lived the parts of successively Suleika, Mignon, Gretchen and Ellen, ending with a perfectly balanced Ave Maria. The purity of the voice perfectly blended with the clarity of the piano playing of Ja Yeon Kang (with the smoothest-running Spinnrade of the Festival). They distilled the essence of each song. With no other performers did one feel closer to the poet and the composer.
As part of the Festival, Sarah Walker directed a Mastercourse at the North Wall consisting of master classes taught by herself and others, culminating in a showcase concert given by some of the students at the end. I attended a session given by the pianist Roger Vignoles and heard him inspiring some of the performers, as if setting a ceiling for them to aspire to. The students were at various stages of their formation as singers, many still having to develop a platform persona. Three voices particularly impressed: Sara Moule, the most mature (inter alia ex-President of the Cambridge Footlights), sang Wolf and Richard Strauss. Her singing inspired some lyrical playing from the pianist William Vann, not apparent in some of his other playing; the voices of Julien Debreuil (baritone, from the WNO Chorus) and Janet Baisarowicz grabbed the attention but both need to learn to project more personality.
The Festival ended on a lighthearted note. The final recital was given by the delightful Sophie Danemann with Malcolm Martineau. Danemann, another last minute substitute, had chosen a programme ideally suited to her voice and personality, starting, in the first half, with Mozart and Mendelssohn and Haydn’s strange cantata Arianna a Naxos. After the interval, they continued with French songs, Fauré, Gounod and Poulenc, performed with perfect rapport; they concluded with Noel Coward and a Cole Porter encore.
This was a Festival long to be savoured with some amazing performances epitomised by the supreme Cooling and Kang, Broderick and Beatty, Holzmair and Drake. But its success owes much to the ambience created by the inspirational Sholto Kynoch and the dedication of the many helpers, by the members of the very mixed audiences, some regulars, others for only one or two concerts and, not least, by the Holywell Music Room which attracts and does justice to great voices. Of all the artistic enterprises deserving of generous sponsorship, this must be a leader.
29 October 2007
The Sixth Oxford Lieder Festival, 12-27 October 2007
There are grave linguistic problems in deciding what to name the various language versions of the repertoire of settings for voice and piano of poetry of the romantic and post-romantic periods. By far the biggest collection is the German Lied and there is a regrettable tendency these days to use this word to cover such songs of all nationality. It is at best a loose umbrella description. Fauré wrote mélodies, not Lieder (though there seems to be no single word to describe the French), Rachmaninov wrote romansi, Vaughan Williams wrote songs. Thus the event under review must be regarded pedantically as The Oxford- Lieder Festival, after its organising body, not The Oxford Lieder-Festival after its content. As such it mixed programmes devoted exclusively to the major Lieder-writers with others leavened by different languages and different genres. The overall programme brought into focus that it is differences of language and hence of musical sound as much as differences in sentiment that distinguish the national song.
This was well illustrated by the programmes of the first two concerts, each devoted equally to four composers. The first was given by the baritone Mark Stone with the Festival’s artistic director, Sholto Kynoch, performing Schumann, Mussorgsky, Duparc and Quilter. Stone has a powerful operatic voice which stood him well in Mussorgsky and Duparc (where singer and piano came together gloriously) but he has yet to learn to tone it down to the intimacy of the Lied - there was no piano, indeed little below mezzo forte. Joan Rodgers (with a marvellous pianist Christopher Glynn) made a mistake in choosing to start her programme abruptly with Wolf’s Mörike settings, not really captivating the audience until half way through, with Verborgenheit. Once warmed up, she charmed our minds with Grieg’s six German songs Op.48 (reminding what a great composer of Lieder he is) and then our hearts, in the second half, with Rachmaninov and Shostakovitch.
Undoubtedly, in the star-studded line up for the Festival, the most eagerly awaited were Olaf Bär and James Gilchrist, heard in the fourth and fifth Festivals respectively. Both had to cancel at the last moment due to a virus. Miraculously, Kynoch was able to find replacements of equal calibre, though different personality, who over-rode the audience’s disappointment. (A further miracle was that corrected programmes were available in time!) The tenor Daniel Norman stood in at the last moment for Gilchrist to sing Die Schöne Müllerin, meeting the pianist Anna Tilbrook only at 4.30 in the afternoon before the concert. It was an enthralling performance, with all the heart-stopping moments in place. The pianist appeared to have an over-powerful left hand and tended to lead the singer at moments of excitement – or was it that she just failed to compensate for the bass-heaviness of the Steinway hired for the Festival, noticed on other occasions? Bär was replaced by the young New Zealand soprano Anna Leese, with Kynoch and, to sing the billed Dichterliebe, the baritone Wolfgang Holzmair (tracked down by Richard Stokes on his way to his Austrian sauna) with Julius Drake. Leese sang a selection of Lieder from Mozart to Richard Strauss with great beauty and charm, ending with a divine Morgen. The performance of Dichterliebe was out of this world! Holzmair uses his whole body to enhance the intensity of his feeling for the music and the words; the unity of voice and piano and the attention to detail, such as the timing of the continuity between songs, transmitted to the audience an awe-inspiring experience. While Holzmair’s gestures might now be found a little mannered and old-fashioned, they do demonstrate a dimension that is missed in many performances today.
Sometimes, when Radio3 is playing in the background, a particular performer seizes and holds the attention. Such was the case recently with Katherine Broderick, winner of the 2007 Kathleen Ferrier award. Sensation! She has tremendous, mature personality and engagement with her audience, a secure voice throughout her vocal range (though she needs to watch her vibrato) and a wide dynamic range, capable at its top of blowing the roof off the Music Room – which it nearly did until she wisely turned down her volume. With her pianist Jonathan Beatty, a stylish player providing just the right level of support, she sang an interesting miscellany of Lied, mélodie and song: Brahms (living ZigeunerLieder), Schubert and Clara Schumann in the first half; in the second, I particularly liked Fauré’s Le Papillon et la Fleur, and two other Hugo settings by Wagner and by Bizet. The ecstatic audience departed listing the operatic roles in which they would love to hear her and see her perform.
A Sunday afternoon recital introduced us to one of the few mezzos heard at the Festival. The Dutch Christianne Stoltijn has a beautiful voice with stage presence to match, particularly her heart-warming lower register, which reminded us that the mezzo is the optimal female voice for Lieder (just as it is the baritone for the male). With Julius Drake, she sang Grieg (again), Brahms and Schumann’s dark Andersen Lieder. She ended with a most moving, if slightly light, interpretation of Brahms’ Vier ernste Gesänge. Another mezzo was the Swedish Anna Grevelius, a star of the 2006 Festival with her persuasive singing of Scandinavian songs and now rapidly making her name in both lieder and opera. (She is currently appearing as Nero in ENO’s despicable aquatic travesty of The Coronation of Poppea together with Lucy Crowe, the other star of 2006.) She opened a programme of Wolf with four Mörike settings establishing immediate rapport with the audience. She was then joined by the baritone David Stout in a performance of twenty of the Eichendorff-Lieder. This was a mesmerising performance held together faultlessly by the formidable piano playing of Sholto Kynoch. These songs are not easy listening for those unfamiliar with them, despite a brilliant pre-concert talk by Richard Stokes, which is why, maybe, the performance failed to receive the ovation it deserved. The penultimate evening concert was given by another fine duo, the baritone Stephan Loges with Eugene Asti. We heard Grieg (yet again), Wolf, Ibert, Brahms and Schumann’s Op.39 Liederkreis, a little lacking in the variety we had been led to expect from another excellent Stokes’ pre-concert talk.
The first of four ‘Lunch with Schubert’ recitals, given in association with the Guildhall School by their students, introduced us to a remarkable young pianist Ja Yeon Kang. Her crystal clear technique and phrasing and, in particular, her perfect synchronisation with her singer marked her out as an exceptional new talent in the field of lieder accompaniment. Of the singers of these liederpop concerts, I give thumbnail impressions of those who stood out. Rhona McCail with a charming voice and presence had beautifully controlled crescendi. In the second, Alexander Baker had a fine full baritone voice but needs to make contact with his audience. The third was an intelligently chosen selection of the watery end of the composer’s output, with one of the heavier trout, intelligently sung by Hannah Morrison and a light but dramatic baritone Alexander Duliba.
The fourth Lunch with Schubert recital was, in my opinion, together with Holzmair and Broderick one of the three highlights of the whole Festival. Devoted to Schubert’s Women the youthful soprano Tanya Cooling lived the parts of successively Suleika, Mignon, Gretchen and Ellen, ending with a perfectly balanced Ave Maria. The purity of the voice perfectly blended with the clarity of the piano playing of Ja Yeon Kang (with the smoothest-running Spinnrade of the Festival). They distilled the essence of each song. With no other performers did one feel closer to the poet and the composer.
As part of the Festival, Sarah Walker directed a Mastercourse at the North Wall consisting of master classes taught by herself and others, culminating in a showcase concert given by some of the students at the end. I attended a session given by the pianist Roger Vignoles and heard him inspiring some of the performers, as if setting a ceiling for them to aspire to. The students were at various stages of their formation as singers, many still having to develop a platform persona. Three voices particularly impressed: Sara Moule, the most mature (inter alia ex-President of the Cambridge Footlights), sang Wolf and Richard Strauss. Her singing inspired some lyrical playing from the pianist William Vann, not apparent in some of his other playing; the voices of Julien Debreuil (baritone, from the WNO Chorus) and Janet Baisarowicz grabbed the attention but both need to learn to project more personality.
The Festival ended on a lighthearted note. The final recital was given by the delightful Sophie Danemann with Malcolm Martineau. Danemann, another last minute substitute, had chosen a programme ideally suited to her voice and personality, starting, in the first half, with Mozart and Mendelssohn and Haydn’s strange cantata Arianna a Naxos. After the interval, they continued with French songs, Fauré, Gounod and Poulenc, performed with perfect rapport; they concluded with Noel Coward and a Cole Porter encore.
This was a Festival long to be savoured with some amazing performances epitomised by the supreme Cooling and Kang, Broderick and Beatty, Holzmair and Drake. But its success owes much to the ambience created by the inspirational Sholto Kynoch and the dedication of the many helpers, by the members of the very mixed audiences, some regulars, others for only one or two concerts and, not least, by the Holywell Music Room which attracts and does justice to great voices. Of all the artistic enterprises deserving of generous sponsorship, this must be a leader.
29 October 2007