Wigmore Hall, London
11 September 2008
Vaughan Williams Series
Joan Rodgers (soprano)
Christopher Maltman (baritone)
Julius Drake (piano)
Ralph Vaughan Williams: Three Poems by Walt Whitman
Nocturne
A clear midnight
Joy, shipmate, joy
Herbert Howells:
The little boy lost
O my deir hert
O garlands, hanging by the door
Girl’s song
Lost love
Blaweary
Ralph Vaughan Williams: Two Pieces for Violin and Piano [Romance; Pastorale]
Along the Field
Four Last Songs
Gerald Finzi:
Before and After Summer Op.16
Selection: Childhood among the ferns
Before and after summer
Overlooking the river
Channel firing
The too short time
Amabel
He abjures love
Herbert Howells:
Four French Chansons, Op.29
Ralph Vaughan Williams:
Two English Folksongs arranged for Voice and Violin:
Searching for lambs
The lawyer
Two Vocal Duets for Soprano, Baritone, Piano and Violin Obbligato:
The last invocation
The love song of the birds
What the critics say
Hilary Finch, The Times, 15 September 2008
One of the most rewarding spin-offs of Vaughan Williams’s year is the exposure it is giving to his friends and contemporaries
The Proms may have played more notes of Vaughan Williams than anyone else in this, his anniversary year, but the Wigmore Hall, in its “Vaughan Williams and Friends” series, is certainly offering the most irresistible double-scoops.
Soon after the hall opened for the new season its audience was treated to the first performance in modern times (and probably since 1912) of two still unpublished vocal duets by RVW for soprano and baritone, with piano and violin obbligato. The Last Invocation and The Love Song of the Birds were the composer’s first settings of the poetry of Walt Whitman. This was rhapsodic salon music, vibrant with Whitman’s own ardour. Jack Liebeck’s soaring violin reminded us that the composer had recently studied with Bruch – and Julius Drake (whose idea all of this was) exuberantly accompanied Joan Rodgers and Christopher Maltman.
The later, though scarcely more familiar, Three Poems by Walt Whitman had started the evening. It was a brave beginning, for these long-breathed yet stark and austere settings shadow rather than set the words. Maltman and Drake uncovered their emotional undertow with quiet mastery. Courageous, too, to continue with a Vaughan Williams that too few know: his postwar settings of A.E. Housman for solo voice and violin. Rodgers and Liebeck explored Along the Field with a sweet, improvisatory poignancy that was revelatory.
One of the most rewarding spin-offs of Vaughan Williams’s year is the exposure it is giving to the music of his friends and contemporaries. Herbert Howells was here, too; but the real highlight of this recital was Maltman’s outstanding performance of Gerald Finzi’s word-lively and entirely distinctive Thomas Hardy settings in Before and After Summer – the sparkling spray of waterbirds and the dark guns of war both affirming the music’s irrepressible life force.
George Hall, The Guardian,17 September 2008
4 stars
The first of a series of recitals celebrating Vaughan Williams and friends focused on his songs and those of his younger colleagues Herbert Howells and Gerald Finzi. The last of the three is generally acknowledged to have made the greatest contribution. In his substantial selection from Finzi’s Thomas Hardy collection, Before and After Summer, baritone Christopher Maltman demonstrated not only the composer’s absolute identification with the poet, but also his own formidable powers as an interpreter. Finzi’s knack of finding appropriate musical imagery to focus on textual detail never compromises his compositional overview, and Maltman’s wide-ranging voice, offering a huge variety of colour and dynamics, sought out a wealth of subtle meanings. Few singers are as expert in presenting words and notes in one indissoluble sequence of successful gestures.
In her two Howells groups, soprano Joan Rodgers had the harder task. Of a mixed batch of six songs composed between 1916 and 1934, only the folksy Blaweary proved striking. A second set, Four French Chansons arranged at the end of the first world war, covered similar territory. But Rodgers was in muted voice and made comparatively little of admittedly limited material.
The bulk of the programme – devised by pianist Julius Drake, whose accompanying fulfilled every requirement – consisted of works by Vaughan Williams, mostly little known but all worthwhile. Two groups were scored, unusually, for voice and violin, the 1927 AE Housman cycle Along the Field and Two English Folksongs; the former often spare and surprisingly sour in tone, the latter the quintessence of Vaughan Williams’s folk-based style. In these and two early pieces for violin and piano, Jack Liebeck added a third, highly eloquent voice to proceedings
Richard Nicholson,www.classicalsource.com
This was an imaginatively planned (by Julius Drake), scrupulously prepared and generously composed recital. A full two hours of actual music, with regularly revolving combinations of musicians and representing the varied work of three English composers, should have satisfied the appetite of the most avid enthusiast for English song, with the only real reservation being the lack of humour.
The suspicion that Ralph Vaughan Williams was uncomfortable with the piano, causing him to choose other instruments to accompany the voice in some of his song-cycles, was tested by the choice of repertoire in the first half of this recital. The opening set of piano-accompanied Walt Whitman settings offered two intense, cheerless songs focusing on death, with the emphasis strongly on the voice, supported by a generally dour accompaniment. Christopher Maltman immediately found the right tone, drawing us into the solemnity of the opening two songs. With his precise enunciation of the text, a feature striking throughout the evening, he conveyed the relentless onset of night and a sense of resignation, intent apparently on not disturbing the peace of the “soul passing over” referred to in the last stanza of ‘Nocturne’. If the singing was subdued in these songs, the same theme was projected with energy but without overstatement in the sea-shanty format of ‘Joy, shipmate, joy!’.
Violinist Jack Liebeck warmed up for his accompanying role in “Along the Field” with two pre-World War One pieces for violin and piano. The rhapsodic nature of ‘Romance’ contrasted with the more thematic ‘Pastorale’, in which there was an imitative dialogue between violin and piano. In the song-cycle the violin line made an eloquent contribution to the predominantly morbid tone: the double-stopped drone in ‘Along the field’ itself and the sustained cantabile of the final song “With rue my heart is laden”. The instrument’s powers of expression were also called on in the infectious dance rhythm of ‘Fancy’s knell’ and the wit of ‘Good-bye’.
Drake resumed his partnership with the baritone in Vaughan Williams’s “Four Last Songs”, which represented Maltman at his best. The voice is wholly pliable, able to contain changes of dynamic, register and colour within an uninterrupted line. The control of what is a sizeable voice was illustrated in the restrained context of ‘Tired’, then matched in the pointed variations of ‘Menelaus’, with its progress from pianissimo to fortissimo as the singer clamours “Stretch out your hand” before returning through expert use of diminuendo in head voice to the final vision of the reception of the returned hero, delivered with just the right colour – and all utterly spontaneous. One was not troubled by the assignment to a baritone of songs intended for a mezzo-soprano.
Joan Rodgers’s first group of Herbert Howells songs comprised published and unpublished items. Two lullabies, “O my deir hert” and “Blaweary” were themselves contrasted, the former devout, the latter folksy, a quality shared with the other setting of Wilfrid Wilson Gibson, “Girl’s Song”; the composer intended to write a six-strong set of lyrics by this poet. Experimentation with diverse musical styles was also demonstrated in the respectively modal and pentatonic manner of “The little boy lost” and “Lost love”. Rodgers moved with confident musicianship across the frontiers.
The role of the accompaniment in these songs was generally muted. Only occasionally did Drake have the opportunity to join with his partner in sharing the expression. He ended “Girl’s song” with a rhetorical flourish and opened out in warmth when in “Lost love” the composer has allowed harmony to gush forth in an otherwise austere context to describe the origins of love and the girl’s hopes for its renewal.
Otherwise it was the singer, sometimes unaccompanied, who carried the burden of interpreting the poetry. Rodgers left no doubt of her heartfelt identification with each of these intensely subjective songs but she had a tendency to over-emphasise particular words, sometimes also underlining them with obtrusive gestures. Her line had bulges where Maltman’s was smooth, her interpretation seemed calculated where his was natural. Where adjustments of tone-colour were left to register unaided her interpretation was at its most effective, most notably in the closing lines of the unpublished “O garlands hanging by the door”, a manuscript copy of which is in the Royal College of Music archive and was dedicated to the tenor Gervase Elwes.
Rodgers returned in the second half for Howells’s “Four French Chansons”, written just at the end of the First World War. These are settings of folk-tales, composed with a wider range of musical artifice than might be evident at first sight. In the opening song about the pious princess and the pagan king Rodgers favoured her soubrettish high register, while in the third, impersonating an under-age novitiate applying for entry to a convent, the simple repetitive vocal pattern did not prevent her from characterising the participants in the narrative or applying warm lyricism to some of the utterances. She was equally adept in Howells’s witty setting about a tailor rejected as a suitor despite his belief in the value of a steady occupation.
The seven songs from Finzi’s “Before and After Summer” contained the most equal partnership between singer (Maltman) and pianist. Finzi’s strict preference for syllabic word-setting reduces the singer’s options for detailed word-painting, well as Maltman worked to illuminate Thomas Hardy’s obscure verse. ‘Channel firing’ is the most celebrated song in this collection and the changing episodes of its narrative were clearly evident in this performance but the other songs were not overshadowed. Drake brought out the independent character of his instrument’s part in ‘Childhood among the ferns’ and vividly portrayed the transition from agitation to depression in the title song. His setting of atmosphere at the start of songs was vital: the portrayal of falling leaves in ‘The too short time’ and the racing accompaniment of the opening of ‘He abjures love’ made the contrast with the demoralised ending of both those songs.
Two tailpieces extended the concert, rather unnecessarily, though the duets, in a late-Romantic idiom, were receiving their first performance in modern times. One not insignificant complaint: the programme-content-page as advertised on the Wigmore Hall website until at least lunchtime on the day of the recital promised us “Songs from Peacock Pie” by Howells and the cycle “Earth and Air and Rain” as the Finzi offering; it also made no mention of the violin solos or the Vaughan Williams folksong arrangements or duets. Reviewers do their homework and find it frustrating to discover that they have been revising for the wrong syllabus!