Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh Festival

11:00am, 19 August 2009

Bejun Mehta, counter tenor
Julius Drake, piano

Henry Purcell
Strike the Viol
Olinda in the shades unseen
Since from my dear Astrea’s sight
Evening Hymn (arr. Britten)

Joseph Haydn
Sympathy
She never told her love
Fidelity

Ludwig von Beethoven
An die ferne Geliebte

Interval

Ralph Vaughan Williams: Linden Lea

Herbert Howells: The Widow Bird

Lennox Berkeley: The Horseman

Herbert Howells: The Little Boy Lost

Charles Villiers Stanford: La Belle Dame sans Merci

Peter Warlock: The Lover’s Maze

Ivor Gurney: Down by the Salley Gardens

Ralph Vaughan Williams: Silent Noon

Peter Warlock: Jillian of Berry

Sensational countertenor Bejun Mehta returns to the Festival with long term collaborator Julius Drake for this concert of works by Purcell, Haydn, Beethoven’s only song cycle An die ferne Geliebte and a host of romantic English songs by Vaughan Williams, Berkeley, Warlock, Howells and Gurney.

This event will be broadcast on BBC Radio 3’s Lunchtime Concerts programme at 1:00pm, 27 August 2009. The programme will then be available for streaming and download for one week at bbc.co.uk/iplayer.

Click photo for the Edinburgh Festival website

What the critics say

http://www.theherald.co.uk/features/features/display.var.2526611.0.Edinburgh_International_Festival_Music.php
★★★★★

WHAT the Edinburgh International Festival music programme has lacked so far is a good old-fashioned, dyed-in-the-wool sensation.

Yesterday it got one from, of all sources, a morning recital by American counter tenor BejunMehta, flawlessly accompanied by pianist Julius Drake.

The programme was extraordinary. No surprise that a counter tenor recital should include songs by Henry Purcell; a touch more of a surprise that it featured songs by Haydn,which sat remarkably well on the ultra-high voice. But Beethoven’s song cycle An die ferne Geliebte was a wholly unlikely candidate for inclusion, as was the entire second half, given over to English songs by VaughanWilliams, Howells, Berkeley, Stanford, Peter Warlock and Ivor Gurney.

Increasingly, throughout the recital, it became clear that Mehta was steadily drawing his large audience into the palm of his hand.They were enthralled. Partly it was to do with his voice. Mehta’s is not one of those fruity or plummy counter tenor voices.There is a lean purity to his tone; and where many counter tenors go for an ethereal, floating quality of sound, Mehta’s tone has a more naturalistic quality,which adds an intensely human dimension towhat can often seem otherworldly.

It took awhile to get one’s head around the actual soundworld of the Beethoven cycle, though the sheer intimacy of Mehta’s performance was magnetic. But all those gorgeous English songs, such as Linden Lea and Herbert Howells’s emotionally harrowing Little Boy Lost, emerged anew, and with real emotional depth.

After Peter Warlock’s riotous songs, the crowd went wild for Mehta, who responded by going into full-blooded Handelian mode for a spectacularly virtuosic spoof on Old Mother Hubbard,which he then repeated, even more outrageously florid the second time round.

Simon Thompson, Seen & Heard

http://www.musicweb-international.com/sandh/2009/jul-dec09/eif_1908.htm

Even in spite of the popularity of the early music revival, a recital from a solo countertenor alone is rare indeed. But then this is Bejun Mehta, one of most impressive of their current number. He is by now a familiar guest at the Edinburgh Festival and the warmth of his reception this morning showed why he enjoys coming back. He once said that he loves recitals because they give him a break from singing Handel. Well his choice of repertoire remains daring, stretching all the way from Purcell to Berkeley. An die ferne Geliebte, the only coherent “group” in the recital, is normally cast for a darker baritone, but Mehta made it entirely his own, inhabiting the endless longing of the poetry and the subtlety of Beethoven’s setting. He was helped by the incomparable Julius Drake, surely the most sensitive of Lieder accompanists, whose keyboard responded to every nuance of the vocal writing like the finest of hand-in-glove collaborators.

Mehta’s countertenor is more ethereal than most of his colleagues’, even ghostly at times, but it manages to remain muscular and broad, finding strength in the middle and bottom of his range while rarely sounding under pressure at the top. He caresses each phrase as if to make the experience of listening as sensuous as possible and I have never seen a singer who can be so creative while keeping his mouth almost closed: for long-held words like “time” his lips were barely open but the distinctive effect was magical.

Mehta’s wide baroque experience helped him to bring a special flair to the Purcell settings, while the piano’s ground bass lent a sometimes unsettling inevitability to the Evening Hymn. The English settings were nicely varied, from the pastoral pleasure of Linden Lea to the infinite loss in Gurney’s setting of Down by the Salley Gardens. The two standouts in the second half were the touchingly beautiful Silent Noon (quite ravishing) and Stamford’s spellbinding La Belle Dame sans Merci which rose to a truly chilling climax. However the show was stolen by the well-chosen encore, a hilarious Handelian take on Old Mother Hubbard which sent up opera seria’s conventions while giving Mehta a chance to show off his operatic gifts with tongue firmly in cheek. Then, as if to reinforce the point, he sang it again with ornamentations, a nice star turn to finish with.