Leeds Lieder Festival
3 October 2009
James Gilchrist (tenor)
Endellion String Quartet
Andrew Watkinson & Ralph de Souza (violin)
Garfield Jackson (viola)
David Waterman (cello)
Julius Drake (piano)
Ralph Vaughan Williams: Four Hymns for tenor, viola and piano
Lord! Come Away!
Who is this fair one?
Come Love, come Lord
Evening Hymn
Ralph Vaughan Williams: On Wenlock Edge for tenor, piano and string quartet
From far, from eve and morning
Is my team ploughing?
Oh, when I was in love with you
Bredon Hill
Clun
Ivor Gurney: Ludlow and Teme for tenor, piano and string quartet
When smoke stood up from Ludlow
Far in a western brookland
‘Tis time, I think
On the idle hill of summer
When I was one and twenty
The Lent lily
Interval
Benjamin Britten:
Lachrymae, reflections on a song of Dowland for viola and piano
Gavin Bryars: Four Songs from Northern Seas (Leeds Lieder+ commission, world première) Texts by George Bruce
The Fisherman
A Departure
The Helmsman
The Seaman, an Epilogue
What the critics say
Alfred Hickling, guardian.co.uk, 6 October 2009
Composer Gavin Bryars once found his works filed in a record shop under “jazz, classical, ambient and easy listening”. His new song cycle, commissioned by the third Leeds Lieder festival, could be called a bold entry into the genre of uneasy listening.
Bryars’s setting of four poems by the Scottish writer George Bruce follows the conventional format established by classical songwriters such as Schubert, Schumann and Wolf. Given that Bryars’s most famous vocal work, Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet, featured Tom Waits and a tramp, such adherence to tradition seems a radical departure in itself. But the texture of the work lies in Bryars’s response to the bleak exposure of Bruce’s lines. Bruce (who would have been 100 this year) was a poet of wild, open spaces whose lines are full of imagery of lone fishermen and doughty croft-holders battling against biting gales.
Tenor James Gilchrist produced a powerful yet graceful line underpinned by the buffeting of pianist Julius Drake’s accompaniment, like a swan with its legs paddling furiously underneath. The pair were equally fine in a series of Housman poems by Ralph Vaughan Williams and Ivor Gurney augmented by the excellent Endellion String Quartet. But the highlight was a late addition in which Gilchrist sang from memory an intimate account of John Dowland’s If My Complaints Could Passions Move to Drake’s gentle accompaniment. Hearing Dowland on a piano is a rare treat, and it teasingly suggested that the source of the classical song tradition may lie a couple of hundred years earlier than previously suspected.
Hilary Finch, The Times October 6, 2009
Every two years in Leeds one long weekend is devoted to “filling the city with song!” Both the exclamation mark in the slogan, and the little plus sign in the festival’s name are significant. For this, despite its short duration, is one of the most exuberant and far-reaching festivals of art-song in the UK.
The idea is to propel song and its audiences far beyond the cosy confines of what is normally perceived as the world of lieder. Too many such festivals are really little more than Wigmore Hall for the regions. In Leeds, the festival’s founder and director, Jane Anthony, works year-round to create new songs and new audiences for song: from primary school initiatives, to flamenco, to wacky pairings of young composers with poets, to new commissions.
This year, John Woolrich’s flinty little eight-minute cycle to poems by Christina Rossetti and Emily Dickinson received its world premiere in a performance by the mezzo Anna Stephany, accompanied by Jonathan Fisher. Both of them, at relatively short notice, made real music of a score that sounded as though they had known it for months. In the six tiny songs of And Winter Comes, Woolrich’s spare, atonal language artfully crystallises Rossetti’s nostalgia, and caresses Dickinson’s mordant perceptions.
Woolrich was absent. But Gavin Bryars was there to acknowledge the warm applause for his specially commissioned Four Songs from Northern Seas. They’re salty settings of the Scottish poet George Bruce. Bryars enfolds these gently talking, walking cameos of fisherman, helmsman and seaman in rhapsodic harmonic and vocal language, honed by lively piano writing.
He couldn’t have had more zealous advocates at this world premiere than Julius Drake (this year’s artistic director) and the tenor James Gilchrist. The latter’s ardour in communicating the English language in all its variety of metre and inflection was showcased in his generous recital of English song. I don’t know that I’ve ever heard such fiercely impassioned performances of Ivor Gurney’s Ludlow and Teme and Vaughan Williams’s On Wenlock Edge. The Endellion Quartet were there to recreate with Drake the gale of life and the mist over the coloured counties.
There was, of course, lieder too. Drake accompanied the mezzo Christianne Stotijn in an outstanding opening performance of Schumann’s Frauenliebe und Leben, and songs by Grieg and Mahler. And the baritone Philip Smith joined Anna Stephany, finding just the right tone for songs by Barber and Strauss.
And the newest of the new? The young mezzo Laura Jayne Bowler, accompanied by Rachel Meerloo on double bass, sang her own eloquent setting of Frederic Greenall’s FaceHooked, a witty reflection on techno-relationships — just one of eight new art-songs workshopped here to challenge the future