Wigmore Hall, London
28 September 2007
Patricia Rozario (soprano)
Julius Drake (piano)
Joseph Haydn
English Songs
Manuel de Falla
Trois mélodies
Benjamin Britten
The Poet’s Echo Op. 76
Interval
John Casken
Chansons de Verlaine
Franz Liszt
Victor Hugo settings
John Tavener
A selection of Schuon Lieder
What the critics say
George Hall, The Guardian, Tuesday 2 October 2007
Soprano Patricia Rozario’s Wigmore recital focused on composers setting languages other than their own. As a specialist in new music, she found room for two premieres, by John Casken and John Tavener.
Casken’s Chansons de Verlaine set three poems with a heightened sensitivity to language and atmosphere. Particularly effective was the translucent accompaniment to L’Ombre des Arbres, evoking a misty landscape as a metaphor for drowned hope. But Casken also caught the ambiguity of Chevaux de Bois, with its wooden horses turning on the merry-go-round amid the mixed fortunes of the onlookers.
Rozario premiered Tavener’s Schuon Lieder in their original hour-long version with ensemble accompaniment (including Tibetan temple bowls) in 2004. Here she gave the first performance of six items from the sequence with piano accompaniment delivered by Julius Drake. The Swiss mystic Frithjof Schuon had a major impact on Tavener’s ongoing spiritual development; the settings show an artistic development, too, with more complex musical events than is usual in Tavener and some back references to the German lieder tradition, though they still err more on the side of banality than simplicity. Rozario’s easy access to her top register helped her through Japanische Musik, and her range of vocal colours worked to the advantage of both Tavener’s and Casken’s lucid textures.
Earlier, in three of the English canzonets composed by Haydn on his second visit to London in 1794, raw tone and a tendency for pitch to sag were problems, while four of Liszt’s Victor Hugo settings lacked sensuousness. Britten’s Pushkin settings in The Poet’s Echo, written for Galina Vishnevskaya, needed more intensity. But Rozario had a definite success with De Falla’s Trois Mélodies, bringing an easy allure to a street-girl from Madrid in Seguidilla.