Song at the Temple
London Middle Temple Hall, Fleet St
10 January 2006, 19:30
Sir Thomas Allen (baritone)
Julius Drake (piano)
Robert Schumann: Dichterliebe and English Song
What the critics say
George Hall The Guardian, Thursday 12 January 2006
4 stars
Devised and accompanied by pianist Julius Drake, the 2005-6 song series in the resplendent setting of Middle Temple Hall focuses on Schumann, and to Sir Thomas Allen fell the prize trophy of Dichterliebe. If Schumann’s finely integrated cycle to a series of increasingly bitter love poems by Heine is essentially a young singer’s piece, the benefits of age and experience told in Allen’s comprehensively searching exploration of its multiplicity of precisely defined emotional states.
As the optimism of the early songs gave way first to the pain and isolation of rejection, then to the alternate nostalgia and grim negativity of the close, Allen’s traversal of this destructive journey was charted, both vocally and with his acting skills concentrated in mutely communicative facial expressions, with supreme assurance. If not every note within his voice these days sounds with the resonance it once had, his artistic powers are undiminished.
For all its visual magnificence, the hall is not ideal for singing nor, as an occasional roughness in Drake’s normally immaculate tonal colour scheme suggested, to play in. But one of its historic associations – Twelfth Night was given its first recorded performance here, in 1602 – provided the cue for Quilter’s Three Shakespeare Songs in the second half, two of them taken from that play. These are beautifully crafted settings, to which Allen and Drake brought their full imaginative resources, as they did to Warlock’s Three Belloc Songs, all tinged with the composer’s bitter-sweet harmony and characteristic melancholy.
A couple of distinguished items by Frank Bridge preceded Allen and Drake entering parlour piano territory, and taking the audience with them. When the big tune swung into view in Haydn Wood’s Love’s Garden of Roses, a collective smile enveloped the auditorium. Great music it may not be, but when sold to us by such persuasive performers it proved impossible to resist.