Vaughan Williams and Friends
Wigmore Hall, London
6 January 2009
Mark Padmore (tenor)
Julius Drake (piano)
Nicolas Daniel (oboe / cor anglais)
Ileana Ruhemann (flute)
Simon Rowland-Jones (viola)
Ralph Vaughan Williams:
Mark Padmore, Alex Redington, Jonathan Stone, John Myerscough
Merciless Beauty
Ralph Vaughan Williams:
Mark Padmore, Simon Rowland-Jones, Julius Drake
Four Hymns for tenor, viola and piano
Lord! Come away!
Who is this fair one?
Come love, come Lord
Evening Hymn
Ralph Vaughan Williams:
Mark Padmore, Nicholas Daniel
10 Blake Settings
Infant Joy
A poison tree
The piper
London
The Lamb
The shepherd
Ah! Sun-flower! weary of time
Cruelty has a human heart
The divine image
Eternity
Interval
Ralph Vaughan Williams:
Nicholas Daniel, Julius Drake
Studies in English Folksong
Peter Warlock:
Mark Padmore, Ileana Ruhemann, Nicholas daniel, Doric String Quartet
The Curlew
He reproves the curlew
The lover mourns for the loss of love
The withering of the boughs
He hears the cry of the sedge
What the critics say
Erica Jeal, The Guardian, 8 January 2009
Ring out the old year, wring out the composer’s inspiration – that’s usually how the end-of-an-anniversary celebration goes. But not at the Wigmore Hall where the Vaughan Williams series curated by pianist Julius Drake carried on into 2009. Centring around Mark Padmore’s ever more glorious tenor, this programme was far from a postscript.
Drake took a minor role, reflecting the composer’s penchant for teaming singers with less obvious instruments. At its sparest, this meant Padmore duetting with oboist Nicholas Daniel in Ten Blake Settings. Vaughan Williams didn’t particularly like Blake’s poetry, but, without lapsing into imitation folk song, these pieces distilled the essence of the words with affecting directness.
Still, 20 minutes of tenor and oboe is a long time, and the downside to this programme was the pacing. Everything seemed to lead towards the final work, Peter Warlock’s The Curlew, in which Yeats’s poetry of unrequited love came over with despair hauntingly magnified.
It felt a long way from the first work – Vaughan Williams’s Four Hymns, which opened with Padmore’s tenor blazing. The third hymn, Come Love, Come Lord, had a balance of beauty and disquiet that seemed to foreshadow Britten and reminded us, tantalisingly, that Padmore spent last summer trying out his first Peter Grimes.
Merciless Beauty, for which he was joined by three of the Doric Quartet, found Padmore bringing careful lyrical shape to Chaucer, even if the wit in the final number didn’t convince. And, in the Studies in English Folk Song, Daniel made the cor anglais seem the most expressive instrument imaginable. The whole thing held a full audience enthralled. Could it be that a year of anniversary programming has succeeded in making people want to hear more?
Andrew Clark, Financial Times, 7 January 2009
The Handel, Haydn and Mendelssohn anniversaries are upon us, but the echo of the Vaughan Williams year – 2008 marked the 50th anniversary of his death – continues to reverberate. Tuesday’s recital demonstrated what rich seams lie beneath the popular surface of Vaughan Williams’s art: this is what musical anniversaries should be about. It was the latest in a series devised by the pianist Julius Drake, whose programme-making skills and wide-ranging friendships have made him a pivotal figure in London’s busy recital scene.
The repertoire spanned most of Vaughan Williams’s creative life, from Four Hymns (1914) to Ten Blake Settings, the last music he wrote before his death in 1958 aged 86. It underlined his enormous debt to English folksong – virtually every item bore some traditional inspiration – but equally his handsome contribution to it. Merciless Beauty, a product of his early maturity, was the most obvious example. Scored for tenor, two violins and cello, the music is full of wistful melody, capturing the bittersweet timbre of Chaucer’s poetry. Mark Padmore, accompanied by three members of the Doric String Quartet, was in more persuasive voice here than in Four Hymns, whose romantic exaltations – these songs are ballads as much as hosannas – found him battling against Drake’s piano and smothering Simon Rowland-Jones’s plaintiff viola.
The heart of Vaughan Williams’s art came with the Ten Blake Settings, which the composer turned into a retrospective of life – simple in outline but harmonically daring, soulful yet song-full, “kissing the joy as it flies” while basking in “Eternity’s sunrise”. The ambivalence is aptly expressed by the composer’s choice of just two voices, the oboe as mystically eloquent in duet as the human voice unaccompanied. Padmore and Nicholas Daniel pinpointed the music’s unearthliness: no wonder the hall was silent.
It was an inspired stroke to follow this with the purely instrumental Studies in English Folksong, for Daniel’s oboe again sang the music as eloquently as any singer. Then, as a finale, Warlock’s The Curlew for voice and small ensemble – another halfway house between body and spirit, this time desolate in tone, with Yeats’s poetry wreathed and wraithed in “passion dimm’d” sound. An outstanding recital.
Richard Whitehouse, www.classicalsource.com
Ralph Vaughan Williams’s songs are a significant though (a couple of evergreens apart) relatively neglected part of his output – such that the present series, devised by Julius Drake, has been a most welcome feature of the events commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the composer’s death last year.
The first two song-cycles are natural complements to the larger-scale orchestral and choral works from their respective periods. Thus “Four Hymns” (1914), whose rhetorically inclined vocal writing and often elaborately contrapuntal exchanges between viola and piano find a direct corollary in the first two symphonies and the Tallis Fantasia; while the Chaucer settings of “Merciless Beauty” (1921) pursue a more inward, even rarefied manner much more in keeping with A Pastoral Symphony (Symphony No.3) as well as “Sancta civitas”.
Mark Padmore undoubtedly had the (appreciably different) measure of both works – handling the effusive intensity of the former cycle with assurance (as did Drake and Simon Rowland-Jones the intertwining lines for piano and viola) and adopting a restrained yet never detached manner for the latter, whose string trio component was luminously rendered by three members of the Doric Quartet.
Neither work, though, evinces the greatness of “Ten Blake Settings” (1957) which are Vaughan Williams’s final contribution to the genre. Astonishingly, these songs originally had something of a didactic function – written as the musical component of a documentary film about the poet, artist and philosopher. Not that they lose out when heard in a recital context: indeed, the combination of voice and oboe has a plangent expressiveness and innate truthfulness that illuminates these poems from Blake’s “Songs of Innocence and of Experience” as have few, if any, settings before or since. Padmore brought the right degree of artless simplicity to the cycle, not least those three songs where the tenor is unaccompanied, while Nicholas Daniel distilled a purity and telling understatement to the oboe-writing that made this seem quite the most natural combination of voice and instrument.
Opening the second half with Drake, Daniel demonstrated his equal facility with the cor anglais in the affecting Six Studies in English Folksong (1926); miniatures more usually heard on clarinet or viola, but which here took on a certain rusticity of manner which was as appealing as it was appropriate.
Sound preparation, too, for Daniel in his contribution to the final work on the programme. Less a song-cycle than a scena, “The Curlew” (1924) is the largest-scale work which Peter Warlock (born Philip Heseltine) – brought to fruition in his regrettably brief career. In a performance as finely attuned to its unique vision as this one, it is possible to feel that he had expressed the essence of himself therein. Moreover, a work which went through almost a decade of revision before the four settings of W. B. Yeats were decided on is nothing if not inevitable in both its poetic and musical follow-through: the bleak eloquence evident in the instrumental prelude being variously diversified or intensified but never sacrificed as the sequence wends its fateful course. Here, unmistakably, is that inner isolation that the composer often alluded to and which finally proved intolerable to him.
A work, too, which in our time has become synonymous with the artistry of Ian Partridge took on an appreciably different though no less sustained impact in Padmore’s interpretation – its charged intensity palpably underpinned by evocative contributions from Nicholas Daniel and Ileana Ruhemann; with that the Doric Quartet amply suggested, in the music’s harmonic and textural inventiveness, that Warlock did both himself and posterity a disservice by not attempting an autonomous string quartet. “The Curlew” brought the recital to its close in a sombre yet cathartic manner – after which nothing more needed to be said.