Oxford Lieder Festival
Jacqueline du Pré Music Building
18 October 2008
Susan Bickley (mezzo)
Julius Drake (piano)
“Bickley is one of the leading specialists in new music : she and Drake together were excellent.” Musicweb
“Drake too, always a joy to hear, appeared to relish the character- acting demanded of the accompaniment, and provided both a stylistic support and a dramatic sparring partner for Bickley.” Oxford Times
Benjamin Britten (1913-1976): Three French folk songs (Trad.)
La belle est au jardin d’amour
Il est quelqu’un sur terre
Fileuse
Maurice Ravel (1875-1937): Histoires Naturelles (Jules Renard)
La paon
Le grillon
Le cygne
Le martin-pêcheur
La pintade
Maurice Ravel: Chants Populaires (Trad.)
Chanson italienne
Chanson française
Chanson espagnole
Chanson hébraique
Interval
Michael Berkeley (b. 1948): Speaking Silence
Blow, northern wynd (Anon.)
Echo (Christina Rosetti)
And is it night? (Anon.)
The Ragged Wood (WB Yeats)
Père du doux repos (Pontus de Tyard)
Blow, northern wynd (Anon.)
Benjamin Britten : Caberet songs (WH Auden)
Calypso
Johnny
Tell me the truth about love
Funeral blues
Benjamin Britten : Two English folk songs (Trad.)
The trees they grow so high
O Waly Waly
Susan Bickley is firmly established as one of the most versatile mezzo-sopranos, equally at home in the opera house or on the concert platform, with a wide repertory encompassing the Baroque, the great 19th Century dramatic roles and the music of today. She is joined tonight by pianist Julius Drake, whose appearances at the Lieder Festival are always popular and memorable.
What the critics say
Anne Ozorio, Seen and Heard
Fresh from her successful Kostelnička in Cardiff last week, Susan Bickley gave this recital for the Oxford Lieder Festival, where she is much loved. Saturday nights, though, are tricky in Oxford, when the locals decamp, home or to London, so this small but loyal audience was made up of true song aficionados. Bickley was in good form. She started with Benjamin Britten’s Three French Folksongs. These were written when he was fourteen, still at school. They are uncommonly sophisticated for a composer whose command of the language was as yet fairly basic. Yet Britten instinctively has a feel for the natural span of syntax. Perhaps the most successful song, though, is Fileuse where he’s not constrained at all by words, setting the delightful onomatopaiec refrain “Tirouli, tiroula” like abstract music. It’s a delight, and Bickley has the whimsy just right.
The previous day, Sir Thomas Allen had performed Ravel’s Histoires naturelles at the University Church of St Mary the Virgin. So it was interesting to hear Bickley singing the same, but in a quite different timbre. The relative lightness of female voice has its pros and cons. Bickley’s Le Grillon leapt about delightfully, while Allen’s Le Paon (the peacock) had greater gravitas. The peacock bridegroom struts its heavy plumage but the peahen doesn’t appear ! It’s good to hear the song from both perspectives. Still more wit was to come with Ravel’s Chansons populaires. These charming songs evoke “national flavour”, Spanish, French, Italian and Hebrew.
The highlight of the evening, though, was Michael Berkeley’s Speaking Silences, in honour of the composer’s 60th birthday. Before the concert Julius Drake announced that he thought the Berkeley cycle the most significant British song cycle in recent years. Drake should know, he hears them all. The cycle was originally written for baritone, but Drake likes it so much he asked Berkeley to write it for mezzo-soprano as well. It was premiered in 1995 by Drake and Alice Coote.
Speaking Silence may be new work, but like the Britten and Ravel pieces that preceded it on this programme, it builds on folk tradition. The opening song, Blow, northern wind, blow, blow, is an anonymous, ancient refrain. It gives Bickley delicious vowels to curve her voice around, but the piano part is even more impressive. Drake gets to play tricky, turbulent bell like figures. Indeed the “ghost” of an orchestra is present. The vocal part opens out expansively, like a trumpet, lines rising and spreading at the top of the register. The piano part is endlessly inventive, rippling, boisterous, then quietly understated. It must be a joy to play. Often the voice soars with the most minimal accompaniment – single muted notes like punctuation. “Come to me in the silence of the night : Come in the speaking silence of a dream”, Berkeley adapts Cristina Rossetti’s mysterious poem. Then, like a wind instrument, the vocal line returns to rounded vowels, “Speak low, lean low, As long ago, my love, how long ago”.
As Berkeley states in his programme notes, Speaking Silence focuses on “a desire for rest and oblivion” in contrast to his earlier cycle Songs of Awakening Love, written for Heather Harper in 1985. There’s a brief flurry of action in the lively Yeats setting, O hurry where by waters among the trees, making the quiet conclusion more profound. Père du doux rèpos, Sommeil pere du songe comes from an air by the 16th century French poet Pontus de Tyard. Berkeley is stepping back in time, yet the feeling links to Rosetti. “Viens, Sommeil desiré” is a perfect foil for “Come in the speaking silence”. Then the windswept refrain returns and the music blows away as breezily as it came. Bickley is one of the leading specialists in new music : she and Drake together were excellent.
The programme ended on a lively note with Britten’s Cabaret Songs, demonstrating that the “folk” tradition lives on in popular song. These are witty but pointed commentaries on modern life, from the mock heroic Funeral Blues with its downbeat, vaguely jazzy rhythms to the coy Tell me the truth about love. As such they are rather more convincing, and trenchant than Britten’s transcriptions of “real” English folksong, like The Trees they grow so high. That was popular ballad for commercial broadsheets sold in the 18th and 19th centuries. Many years ago, indeed up to the 1950’s , when people still read music and sang themselves, pop songs were sold in much the same way.
Alexandra Coghlan, Oxford Times, 22nd October 2008
The theme of this year’s festival is ‘folksong’, and Saturday night’s recital by mezzo Susan Bickley and pianist Julius Drake interpreted and reinterpreted this idea in a host of musical ways. The beautifully crafted programme of English and French 20th-century music incorporated art songs alongside folksong arrangements, folk pastiches and even cabaret songs — surely the ‘folk’ of the 20th century. With each successive variation on the genre providing playful commentary on its fellows, the result was a dynamic musical challenge that dared its audience to answer the seemingly simple question: what is folksong?
Benjamin Britten’s Three French Folksongs opened the evening — perfect examples of the simple manipulations that transform naïve traditional melodies into nuanced and self-reflexive art song. Together with two of the composer’s English folksong arrangements, they provided a frame for the recital’s more distant musical explorations, and showed off the full emotional range of such works — from the bittersweet pastoral romance of La Belle Est Au Jardin D’Amour and O Waly Waly, to the angular pain of La Fileuse.
The musical highlights of the evening, however, were Ravel’s joyous and witty Chansons Populaires and Britten’s equally tongue-in-cheek Cabaret Songs. Showcasing Bickley’s gift for characterisation and communication, their colourful textures also worked particularly well in the intimate and rather brittle acoustic of the Jacqueline du Pré Music Building, which failed to make real aural sense of Michael Berkeley’s intensely spare cycle Speaking Silence that provided the centrepiece of the concert.
Written originally for a folksong-setting contest, Ravel’s Chansons Populaires comprise four songs, each composed in the style of a different nation. Bickley’s range — both vocal and dramatic — was amply demonstrated in the energy and apparent effortlessness with which she romped from the soulful meanderings of the Chanson Hebraique to the sinuous slitherings and dusky-eyed dramatics of the Chanson Espagnole. Drake too, always a joy to hear, appeared to relish the character- acting demanded of the accompaniment, and provided both a stylistic support and a dramatic sparring partner for Bickley, as well as a masterclass for the audience in the magic that breeds when sheer musicality bridges the gaps between a singer’s intention and a pianist’s instinctive understanding.