Wigmore Hall, London

12 February 2010

Alice Coote (mezzo)
Julius Drake (piano)

Programme

Edward Elgar:
Speak, Music from Op. 41
Pleading Op. 48

Roger Quilter:
There be none of Beauty’s Daughters Op. 24 No. 1
Now sleeps the crimson petal Op. 3 No. 2
Love’s philosophy Op. 3 No. 1

Charles Villiers Stanford: La belle dame sans merci

Edward Elgar: Sea pictures
Sea Slumber-song
In haven (Capri)
Sabbath morning at sea
Where corals lie
The swimmer

Dominic Argento: Songs from the Diary of Virginia Woolf
The Diary
Anxiety
Parents
The Last Entry

Liza Lehmann:
Love if you knew
Ah, Moon Of My Delight

Maud Valérie White: So we’ll go no more a’roving

Graham Peel: The early morning

Charles Villiers Stanford: A soft day

Peter Warlock: Late Summer

Ralph Vaughan Williams: Silent Noon from ‘The House of Life’

Ivor Gurney:
The boat is chaffing
Lights out

No encores

What the critics say

Hilary Finch, The Times,7.2.2010

4 stars

Life is like a little strip of pavement over an abyss. Virginia Woolf wrote the words; the Minnesotan octogenarian Dominick Argento set them to music; and Alice Coote and Julius Drake brought them to painful but wonderful new life in a recital of English-language song that filled the Wigmore Hall.

Argento’s four songs from his cycle From the Diary of Virginia Woolf were the high point of Coote’s recital. The fingers wandered through Woolf’s mind and the voice, in its inflection and its often agonised repetition of certain words, revealed both Argento’s genius in prose-setting and Coote’s total habitation of every passing thought. With her mezzo becoming ever clearer and brighter, flaring into flame at the top of the register, this was a thrilling performance.

The work was written for Janet Baker — and the great Dame was irresistibly recalled too in the evening’s performance of Elgar’s Sea Pictures. But Coote’s is a more fevered approach. The strange otherness of that “elfin land” reveals more menace and, in The Swimmer, more steamy sexuality than in any of Baker’s performances. But, just occasionally, less can be more. And, with the lower register of her mezzo now a little less eloquent, Coote’s very intensity threatened to over-heat the simple tenderness of a song such as In Haven.

But this is to quibble. With songs by Quilter, Stanford, Warlock and Gurney probing levels of emotional recession that few singers dare discover, Coote and Drake’s recital was often breathtaking in its sheer conviction and subtlety of perception.