Wigmore Hall, London
11 July 2011, 13:00
Iestyn Davies (countertenor)
Julius Drake (piano)
FIVE STARS – The Independent
This concert can be heard on the BBC Radio 3 iPlayer until 23 July – click below
S Macrae: The Lif of this World
F Poulenc: Le bestiaire
B Kindsdottir: Haiku
G Fauré: Clair de lune
J Phibbs: The Moon’s Funeral
J Dowland: In darkness let me dwell
G Mahler: Um Mitternacht
R Vaughan Williams: Orpheus with His Lute; The Watermill
G Fauré: Prison
R Vaughan Williams: The Sky Above the Roof
Betty Roe: To God
T F Dunhill: The Cloths of Heaven
E Rubbra: Psalm 150
What the critics say
FIVE STARS
Michael Church, The Independent, 20 July 2011
It’s testimony to the extraordinary interest which counter-tenor Iestyn Davies now arouses that his weekday lunchtime recital was packed.
And for this final concert of Radio 3’s Wigmore season he’d chosen some fascinating rarities, plus new works from two of Britain’s up-and-coming composers.
The first of these, Stuart MacRae’s ‘The Lif[sic] of this world’, was intriguing. MacRae wanted his setting of this ineffably bleak poem – ‘The lif of this world/ is ruled with wind,/ weeping, drede,/ and steryinge’ – to be suitable for any voice-type, singable in any key, with or without instrumental accompaniment, so the latter is limited to a few punctuating chords. The text is in Middle English and the setting is modal: the result, as Davies delivered it, had a timeless Gaelic plangency. This led naturally on to the Gallic charm of the next work, Poulenc’s ‘Le bestiaire’, in which a dromedary, a goat, a grasshopper, and a crayfish were evoked. Sensitively supported by Julius Drake’s accompaniment, Davies characterised each song so persuasively that Poulenc’s hope that the cycle would have Schubertian gravity was triumphantly vindicated.
After a gnomic haiku-setting by the Icelandic composer Blaar Kindsdottir, it was time for some full-dress Faure in the form of his ‘Clair de lune’, which was followed by Joseph Phibbs’s ‘The Moon’s Funeral’ – a a masterly piece of word-setting, with Davies faithfully following the drifting ideas of Hilaire Belloc’s strange poem.
Then came the concert’s centre of gravity, with Dowland’s ‘In darkness let me dwell’ segueing into Mahler’s equally sepulchral ‘Um Mitternacht’. Here Davies was able to remind us of his pre-eminence both in the music of the Elizabethans and in late nineteenth-century Romanticism. Then – this was a cleverly-constructed programme – Vaughan Williams was brought centre-stage in an unusual guise, with his setting of Verlaine’s ‘Prison’ juxtaposed with that of Faure; in terms of musical quality there was little to choose between them.
It was entirely appropriate that for his encore Davies should sing Purcell’s ‘Music for a while’, which is both his calling-card and also the calling-card of the recently-retired James Bowman, whose spirit hovered benignly over this concert, in that two of its songs had been originally written for him. The opening phrase rang out with spine-tingling beauty; the final cadence set the seal on a perfect hour.
A remarkable hour of music to complete Wigmore Hall’s season of BBC Radio 3 Lunchtime Concerts found Iestyn Davies and Julius Drake covering 400 years of song in a programme that might have appeared zany on paper, but which held together with surprising cohesion.
The star of the show was Davies’s voice, a remarkable natural instrument. We were able to hear it in a song of real purity, Stuart MacRae’s The Lif of this World. Written in 2008 for the NMC Songbook, this brief but moving utterance takes as its inspiration a Middle English text, the pianist adding just a couple of punctuating chords. From this we moved to Poulenc’s remarkable set of six brief animal portraits, Le bestiaire, sung as the composer intended – with great seriousness and the minimum dash of humour. Julius Drake helped set the scenes – the strange progress of ‘L’écrevisse’ (‘The crayfish’) and the deliberately lethargic accompaniment to ‘La carpe’ (‘The carp’). Completing the first group of songs was a bleak haiku from Icelandic composer Bláar Kindsdottir (born in 1928).
For the second group Davies explored a nocturnal theme, beginning with Fauré’s wonderfully fluid Clair de lune, Drake’s accompaniment nudging against the chaste vocalism. Another NMC Songbook commission followed, the declamatory The Moon’s Funeral from Joseph Phibbs (born 1974), after which Davies judged his vibrato and tone very carefully and movingly for In darkness let me dwell. ‘Um mitternacht’, from Mahler’s Rückert-Lieder, was powerfully wrought, the ever-watchful Drake subsiding to a soaring climax from Davies, taking the higher notes in his stride.
The third group threw in to contrast Vaughan Williams and Fauré, comparing a setting of Verlaine’s Prison by both composers. Fauré’s stark outlook found a colder tone from Davies, while Vaughan Williams’s setting of Mabel Dearmer’s translation, The sky above the roof, was more contemplative, the translation losing some of the poem’s latent anger. Before these the sweet tone of ‘Orpheus and his lute gave way to a nicely characterised The water mill, which tripped along with the piano part reflecting the flitting swallows, the playing cat and the busy house.
Even more diverse was Davies’s final group, with a powerful anthem from Betty Roe (born 1930), written for James Bowman, giving way to a softly shaded song from Thomas Dunhill, The cloths of heaven’ stylistically akin to Vaughan Williams in its language. Finally Edmund Rubbra’s Psalm 150, set for Kathleen Ferrier and the last song she recorded, hit the soaring heights in a curious celebration that seemed to be over before it began.
This whistle-stop tour of high-range songs showed real imagination in its programming, and Iestyn Davies, singing each from memory, had a remarkable grasp of phrase and melody. His encore, Purcell’s Music for a while, was beautifully restrained.