FRANCESCA CHIEJINA SOPRANO † FLEUR BARRON MEZZO-SOPRANO ‡ NATALIE BURCH PIANO
Benjamin Britten (1913–1976)
OUR
INDIFFERENT
CENTURY
Recorded on 30 November and 1-2 December 2022 in Greyfriars Kirk, Edinburgh Producer/Engineer: Paul Baxter 24-bit digital editing: Jack Davis 24-bit digital mastering: Paul Baxter
Design: Drew Padrutt Booklet editor: Henry Howard Cover image: Seven Sisters, South Downs National Park, Sussex; photo: Andy D Parker / Shutterstock Session photography: foxbrushfilms.com Delphian Records Ltd – Edinburgh – UK www.delphianrecords.com
1
1. Let the florid music praise!
[4:01]
2
2. Now the leaves are falling fast
[2:15]
3
3. Seascape
[2:34]
4
4. Nocturne
[4:35]
5
5. As it is, plenty
[1:56]
6
William Marsey (b. 1989)
[7:05]
Gerald Finzi (1901–1956)
BR I T T E N – F I NZ I – M A R SE Y – WA R D
On this Island, Op. 11 †
Removal and other powers * Before and after Summer, Op. 16 ‡
7
1. Childhood among the Ferns
8
2. Before and after Summer
[3:01]
9
3. The Self-unseeing
[2:57]
10
4. Overlooking the River
[2:43]
11
5. Channel Firing
[6:16]
12
6. In the Mind’s Eye
[2:23]
13
7. The Too Short Time
[3:01]
14
8. Epeisodia
[2:34]
15
9. Amabel
[3:10]
16
10. He Abjures Love
[4:49]
@ delphianrecords
17 Joanna Ward (b. 1998)
SUMMER DRESSES / STRANGER-FRIENDS (bean piece 5) *
@ delphianrecords
Total playing time
@ delphian_records
*premiere recordings
[3:53]
[7:10] [64:33]
Notes on the music ‘I wonder/Will the world ever saner be/ … than when He sent us under/In our indifferent century!’ So muses one of the corpses in Thomas Hardy’s poem ‘Channel Firing’, written in April 1914, a few months before the start of World War I. Several bodies have been disturbed in a churchyard during the testing of gunneries out to sea. The (surprisingly conversational) voice of God reassures the dead that while it is not – or not yet – the fury of ‘Judgment-Day’ that rattled their coffins, nonetheless the world remains as violent and irrational as ever: ‘All nations striving strong to make/Red war yet redder. Mad as hatters …’ There is bleakly sardonic humour in the poem along with the ironic, even detached stance characteristic of Hardy. (His poetic scenes are frequently witnessed through a window, through the branches of trees, through the filter of memory.) Here, it is expressed through a barrier between the living and the dead, and with a God who breaks the fourth wall. Despite the ironic elements in ‘Channel Firing’, however, its date suggests prophecy of the unspeakable horrors to come. Yet Hardy would have no means of knowing what was coming down the tracks within a few short months, let alone the further destructive decades later. Gerald Finzi, approaching Hardy’s poems from the other side of initially one but eventually two world wars (Before and after Summer was composed between 1932 and 1949) found a rich source of inspiration and consolation in
the verse’s emotional properties. He set over fifty of them during his life, drawn to their melancholy, and in particular to the poet’s preoccupation with passing time (Finzi even changed the title of ‘The best she could’ to ‘The Too Short Time’). Indeed, the songs in Before and after Summer frequently display an appropriately ‘before and after’ quality. In several there is an ABA structure, in which the second ‘A’ is transformed, poignantly, by what has taken place in B, whether that be a rain shower, or the change of a season, or death itself. And the sombre quality of the cycle was doubtlessly influenced by the horrifying global developments in Finzi’s own time. He remarked to his wife on the day Germany entered Austria that it was ‘like watching a man done to death, only this is a civilisation and the last stand of central European culture’. Hardy and Finzi shared 27 years on earth, though it is uncertain whether they ever met in person. By contrast, Britten and Auden were contemporaries, with poet pitching words to composer, who would briskly throw back an elegant musical setting. Like Finzi, both were aware of and profoundly unsettled by the growing discord in the world. Auden, a restless spirit and inveterate traveller, viewed at first hand the rapidly changing political climate in Berlin in the late 1920s, and later witnessed front-line action during the Spanish Civil War. Britten was less experienced, and certainly less of an activist than his
collaborator, but, like Auden, chose to leave Europe for the USA in the first half of 1939 (again, echoing Finzi, he believed that Europe was ‘finished’). On this Island (1937) is less radical in content than the earlier Britten– Auden collaboration Our Hunting Fathers (1936) – a somewhat wild satire of blood sports and encroaching fascism – yet even within its self-consciously pleasing contours it retains a contemporary bite. Auden has been described as a ‘spiritual physician’ for his entire generation, an artist who consciously sought to fuse the political and the creative, and to express through his craft the urgency of the moment. Many artists today feel the same urgency, and can channel it through a remarkable variety of means. Dense political documents, for example, can form the basis of an artistic event: the Edinburgh Festival Fringe hosted a continuous reading of the Chilcot Report into the 2003 invasion of Iraq over the course of 284 hours, organised by comedian Omid Djalili. And an immigration bill is the text for William Marsey’s Removal and other powers (2022). In the few short years since this bill was passed, during the deliberate creation of a ‘hostile environment’ for immigrants, the Windrush scandal has erupted along with the proposed deportation of asylum seekers to Rwanda. In 2023 we are, seemingly, living through yet one more ‘indifferent century’. Against what might seem an unrelenting
backdrop of despair, however, there are moments of crystallised beauty in this album, and even reasons to be cheerful. Some of the Hardy settings frame these moments with loss and regret, but others are more purely in thrall to the landscape. Music itself can charm and beguile its own words into sumptuous forms: ‘Nocturne’, for example, is one of Britten’s most purely exquisite settings. And while not without its own disquieting echoes, Joanna Ward’s SUMMER DRESSES / STRANGER-FRIENDS is a wistful moment in time, a sunny scene glimpsed through trees, with its ‘marigold smiles and summer skirts’, and a simple wish to breathe out. * On this Island is a series of vignettes, each highly characterised. It opens with a piano fanfare, a ‘florid’ figure, suggested by the opening words (Britten had originally written a more melodramatic piano glissando). The voice takes on this floridity with some dramatic melismas (several notes to a single vowel sound), much in the vein of Henry Purcell’s extravagant vocal lines from centuries earlier. The fanfares subside in the second half into a different poetic and musical mood, with an almost improvisatory quality to the piano part, especially in its reflective postlude. After some gentle introductory chords, ‘Now the leaves are falling fast’ channels Schubert lieder: a scurrying vocal part over urgent repeated chords in the piano – a remorseless setting of uncomfortable or frustrated imagery. The final
Notes on the music bars reintroduce the chords of the opening in which, as the Auden scholar Alan Warner has put it, there is some potential hope: the mountain could provide water to the travellers. Britten seems to take this ‘could’ as a moment of harmonic ease and repose. ‘Seascape’ contains some almost stereotypical word-painting in its surging waves of piano figures, a self-consciously rapturous, romantic depiction of a coastal landscape. The foreboding image of the ships diverging on ‘urgent voluntary errands’ is hinted at subtly in Britten’s minor inflections. ‘Nocturne’ is a gorgeous lullaby – one of Britten’s many ‘night pieces’ – and a plea to protect all those in the vulnerable state of sleep, including those who are forced to rest ‘in crooked holes’. Britten’s lines rise and fall over simple triads, mirroring the rhythm of Auden’s poem, until a (literally) breathtaking moment at the word ‘lie’. The insouciant ‘As it is, plenty’ is in Britten’s short-lived ‘cabaret’ style, taking its cue from the brittle, satirical text – cynical, light, over in seconds. It was perhaps also written in seconds: it was composed the same day as another song, ‘Not even summer yet’, a touching, more authentically ‘Brittenesque’ tribute to the composer’s late friend, Peter Burra. William Marsey has an extraordinarily eclectic approach to text-gathering. His recent works with words have responded to biblical texts, including the Psalms and verses from
Deuteronomy, while modern poets are represented in Songs of Austerity and I am Become a Man. Marsey’s overall approach and aesthetic, whether drawing on contemporary or older sources, are founded in the ‘now’: from a filmed lockdown commission from Lawrence Power (This poor room) in which the violist records the piece in a makeshift home studio, minutes after playing with his child; to Stone Him, with the strict condemnations of Deuteronomy as a backdrop to people exercising their human freedoms in a park, and concluding with the joyous flight of a rainbow-coloured beachball. In Removal and other powers, the text is barely ten years old. The insidiousness of the Bill’s words is concealed within legalistic, even pompous phrases, piercingly satirised by the musical setting. The opening piano figure has a hint of Debussy’s Doctor Gradus ad Parnassum, that gentle lampoon of fussy intellectualism; the voices are disjointed, their words broken up to forbid easy comprehension, as if generated by faulty AI. Both piano and voices begin to ornament their lines, in a suitably regal manner, towards the middle section of the text (‘Be it enacted by the Queen’s most Excellent Majesty …’). The pronouncement of the Home Secretary is made over dissonant chords and a steely crescendo, becoming increasingly violent under the statement that the Bill is ‘compatible with the European Convention on
Human Rights’. The whole piece exposes the Bill’s heartlessness and cowardly refuge in law. The angry piano postlude is marked ‘no let up’ in the score.
‘Channel Firing’, at the end of the cycle’s first half, is the most substantial of the songs. The walking octaves are to the fore, thickened by an added third, and punctuated by repeated dissonant chords, little stabs of Far from dry legalese is the poetry of Thomas gunfire. God’s voice, increasingly agitated, Hardy. Yet Before and after Summer, a work expresses His mystification at the follies of of great beauty and tenderness, is unafraid of human beings, while the disturbed skeletons the darker side of experience. Stephen Banfield shiver in eerie staccato. The following song, has written that the cycle ‘begins in happier ‘In the Mind’s Eye’, begins with an almost innocence and ends in disillusioned nihilism’. cartoon-like furtive figure, suggestive of the The harmonic structure mirrors this poetic ‘phantom’ the poet sees (or imagines). This trajectory, moving from an optimistic E flat major figure transforms into a chorale-like sadness (the flavour of much of the cycle’s first half) to a at the end. Leaves fall Debussyishly in ‘The close in B minor. Many of the individual songs Too Short Time’, yet despite the brevity of the outline a similar path by frequently deploying leaves’ lives, their beauty is celebrated in a a downward shift into a minor key, and the rare major key conclusion. This heralds a shift pattern is set in the first song, ‘Childhood in mood for the next two songs, ‘Epeisodia’ among the Ferns’. After a suitably sparkling and ‘Amabel’, more conventional in tone. The opening in E flat the rain has a dampening effect marching octaves in the former do not, this on the lyrical material, causing the melodic time, dispel the lighter mood; and while lines of the opening to fragment and lose their perhaps the most theatrical of the cycle, regularity, sinking into a melancholy F minor ‘Amabel’ is also the most conventional in its with solemn octaves in the bass. ‘Before and structure. The cycle closes with ‘He Abjures after Summer’ shifts from a jaunty, syncopated Love’, a bravura conclusion and a summing-up D flat major as the poet looks forward to the of the musical preoccupations of this cycle. It spring, into a post-summer B minor gloom, is in a sombre B minor throughout, sharing a sliding into dissonance and the heavy tread of dramatic heft with ‘Channel Firing’, along with further low octaves. ‘The Self-unseeing’ inhabits some of its hectic rhythms – though without a chromatically unstable environment, lending its black humour. The music seems exhausted it an atmosphere of uncertainty; while even the in the final section, its gravelly octaves once harmonically consistent ‘Overlooking the River,’ more descending to a conclusion – and the with its flowing semiquavers and hummable final ‘Curtain’. theme, shifts inexorably towards a minor key.
Notes on the music Joanna Ward’s protagonist in SUMMER DRESSES / STRANGER-FRIENDS is, as Hardy might, observing a bucolic scene: glimpsing a life she cannot quite access while ‘hiding in the trees’ and yearning to be part of it. This is the fifth in Ward’s series of ‘bean pieces’, the first of which sprouts, as it were, from a packet of runner bean seeds – from the noise they make and the idiosyncratic patterns on their surface – and all of the works in the series are concerned with nature in one way or another. The imaginatively rendered musical world of ‘bean piece 5’ is both wistful and slightly uncanny. The performers are often asked to sing and play their parts in freestyle rhythm, the pianist now and again joining in with her own vocals, while the score is occasionally notated in sketches which perhaps resemble the shaggy pattern on the bean seeds themselves. The voices, sometimes stratospherically high, meet in two-part harmony, or plot their own course. They ebb and flow like the breeze,
at times resembling birdsong, creating a summery soundscape. Other sounds are, by contrast, stuck indoors. The poem was written by the composer’s sister during lockdown, and running in counterpoint to the voices and piano are the buzzing tones of electric fans, or the everyday noises of washing up. The yearning of the poetic voice to ‘feel the air on my knees’ is amplified by this ‘trapped’ quality. All it wishes is ‘for the heart to fill’. © 2023 Lucy Walker Dr Lucy Walker is a musicologist, freelance writer and public speaker, specialising in twentieth- and twenty-first-century music. She has written programme and liner notes and given talks for numerous concert halls and opera houses, as well as regularly podcasting for Britten–Pears Arts. She has edited two books on Benjamin Britten, and her PhD was on the operas of Francis Poulenc.
With huge thanks to all those who made this recording possible: Help Musicians, Britten Pears Arts (for the Ward commission), the Vaughan Williams Foundation, Opera Prelude and the Nicholas Boas Trust; Sir Simon Robey, Peter Wright, Steven Burch, Nicola Burch, Yvonne Horsfall Turner, David Cairns, Natalie Davies, Stevo Glendinning, Susan Graham, Natasha Loges, Felicity Turner and a number of other anonymous donors.
Texts On this Island 1 1. Let the florid music praise!
Let the florid music praise, The flute and the trumpet, Beauty’s conquest of your face: In that land of flesh and bone, Where from citadels on high Her imperial standards fly, Let the hot sun Shine on, shine on. O but the unloved have had power, The weeping and striking, Always: time will bring their hour; Their secretive children walk Through your vigilance of breath To unpardonable Death, And my vows break Before his look.
2 2. Now the leaves are falling fast
Now the leaves are falling fast, Nurse’s flowers will not last; Nurses to the graves are gone, And the prams go rolling on.
Whispering neighbours, left and right, Pluck us from the real delight; And the active hands must freeze Lonely on the separate knees.
Dead in hundreds at the back Follow wooden in our track, Arms raised stiffly to reprove In false attitudes of love. Starving through the leafless wood Trolls run scolding for their food; And the nightingale is dumb, And the angel will not come. Cold, impossible, ahead Lifts the mountain’s lovely head Whose white waterfall could bless Travellers in their last distress. 3 3. Seascape
Look, stranger, at this island now The leaping light for your delight discovers, Stand stable here And silent be, That through the channels of the ear May wander like a river The swaying sound of the sea. Here at the small field’s ending pause Where the chalk wall falls to the foam, and its tall ledges Oppose the pluck And knock of the tide, And the shingle scrambles after the suck -ing surf, and the gull lodges A moment on its sheer side.
5 5. As it is, plenty Far off like floating seeds the ships As it is, plenty; Diverge on urgent voluntary errands; As it’s admitted And the full view The children happy Indeed may enter And move in memory as now these clouds do, And the car, the car That goes so far That pass the harbour mirror And all the summer through the water saunter. And the wife devoted: To this as it is, To the work and the banks Let his thinning hair 4 4. Nocturne And his hauteur Now through night’s caressing grip Give thanks, give thanks. Earth and all her oceans slip, Capes of China slide away All that was thought From her fingers into day As like as not, is not And th’ Americas incline When nothing was enough Coasts towards her shadow line. But love, but love And the rough future Now the ragged vagrants creep Of an intransigent nature Into crooked holes to sleep: And the betraying smile, Just and unjust, worst and best, Betraying, but a smile: Change their places as they rest: That that is not, is not; Awkward lovers like in fields Forget, forget. Where disdainful beauty yields:
While the splendid and the proud Naked stand before the crowd And the losing gambler gains And the beggar entertains: May sleep’s healing power extend Through these hours to our friend. Unpursued by hostile force, Traction engine, bull or horse Or revolting succubus; Calmly till the morning break Let him lie, then gently wake.
Let him not cease to praise Then his spacious days; Yes, and the success Let him bless, let him bless: Let him see in this The profits larger And the sins venal, Lest he see as it is The loss as major And final, final. Wystan Hugh Auden (1907–1973)
Texts 6
Removal and other powers Before and after Summer A bill to make provision about immigration law; to limit, or otherwise make provision about, 7 1. Childhood among the Ferns access to services, facilities and employment I sat one sprinkling day upon the lea, by reference to immigration status; to Where tall-stemmed ferns spread out make provision about marriage and civil luxuriantly, partnership involving certain foreign nationals; And nothing but those tall ferns sheltered me. and for connected purposes. The rain gained strength, and damped each Be it enacted by the Queen’s most Excellent lopping frond, Majesty, by and with the advice and consent Ran down their stalks beside me and beyond, of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and And shaped slow-creeping rivulets as I conned, Commons, in this present Parliament assembled, and by the authority of the same, With pride, my spray-roofed house. And though as follows: anon Some drops pierced its green rafters, I sat on, [The Home Secretary] has made the following Making pretence I was not rained upon. statement under section 19(1)(a) of the Human Rights Act 1998: In my view the The sun then burst, and brought forth a sweet provisions of the Immigration Bill are breath compatible with the Convention rights. From the limp ferns as they dried underneath: I said: ‘I could live on here thus till death’; House of Commons Bill 110 2013–14 (as introduced), introduction and p. 1
And queried in the green rays as I sate: ‘Why should I have to grow to man’s estate, And this afar-noised World perambulate?’ 8 2. Before and after Summer
Looking forward to the spring One puts up with anything. On this February day Though the winds leap down the street, Wintry scourgings seem but play,
And these later shafts of sleet – Sharper pointed than the first – And these later snows – the worst – Are as a half-transparent blind Riddled by rays from sun behind. Shadows of the October pine Reach into this room of mine: On the pine there swings a bird; He is shadowed with the tree. Mutely perched he bills no word; Blank as I am even is he. For those happy suns are past, Fore-discerned in winter last. When went by their pleasure, then? I, alas, perceived not when. 9 3. The Self-unseeing
Here is the ancient floor, Footworn and hollowed and thin, Here was the former door Where the dead feet walked in. She sat here in her chair, Smiling into the fire; He who played stood there, Bowing it higher and higher. Childlike, I danced in a dream; Blessings emblazoned that day; Everything glowed with a gleam; Yet we were looking away!
10 4. Overlooking the River
The swallows flew in the curves of an eight Above the river-gleam In the wet June’s last beam: Like little crossbows animate The swallows flew in the curves of an eight Above the river-gleam. Planing up shavings of crystal spray A moor-hen darted out From the bank thereabout, And through the stream-shine ripped his way; Planing up shavings of crystal spray A moor-hen darted out. Closed were the kingcups; and the mead Dripped in monotonous green, Though the day’s morning sheen Had shown it golden and honeybee’d; Closed were the kingcups; and the mead Dripped in monotonous green. And never I turned my head, alack, While these things met my gaze Through the pane’s drop-drenched glaze, To see the more behind my back … O never I turned, but let, alack, These less things hold my gaze!
Texts 11 5. Channel Firing
That night your great guns, unawares, Shook all our coffins as we lay, And broke the chancel window-squares, We thought it was the Judgment-day And sat upright. While drearisome Arose the howl of wakened hounds: The mouse let fall the altar-crumb, The worms drew back into the mounds, The glebe cow drooled. Till God called, ‘No; It’s gunnery practice out at sea Just as before you went below; The world is as it used to be: ‘All nations striving strong to make Red war yet redder. Mad as hatters They do no more for Christés sake Than you who are helpless in such matters. ‘That this is not the judgment-hour For some of them’s a blessed thing, For if it were they’d have to scour Hell’s floor for so much threatening … ‘Ha, ha. It will be warmer when I blow the trumpet (if indeed I ever do; for you are men, And rest eternal sorely need).’ So down we lay again. ‘I wonder, Will the world ever saner be,’ Said one, ‘than when He sent us under In our indifferent century!’
And many a skeleton shook his head. ‘Instead of preaching forty year,’ My neighbour Parson Thirdly said, ‘I wish I had stuck to pipes and beer.’ Again the guns disturbed the hour, Roaring their readiness to avenge, As far inland as Stourton Tower, And Camelot, and starlit Stonehenge. 12 6. In the Mind’s Eye
That was once her casement, And the taper nigh, Shining from within there, Beckoned, ‘Here am I!’ Now, as then, I see her Moving at the pane; Ah; ’tis but her phantom Borne within my brain! – Foremost in my vision Everywhere goes she; Change dissolves the landscapes, She abides with me. Shape so sweet and shy, Dear, Who can say thee nay? Never once do I, Dear, Wish thy ghost away.
13 7. The Too Short Time Nine leaves a minute Swim down shakily; Each one fain would spin it Straight to earth; but, see, How the sharp airs win it Slantwise away! – Here it say, ‘Now we have finished our summer show Of what we knew the way to do: Alas, not much! But, as things go, As fair as any. And night-time calls, And the curtain falls!’
Sunlight goes on shining As if no frost were here, Blackbirds seem designing Where to build next year; Yet is warmth declining: And still the day seems to say, ‘Saw you how Dame Summer drest? Of all God taught her she bethought her! Alas, not much! And yet the best She could, within the too short time Granted her prime.’
14 8. Epeisodia
I. Past the hills that peep Where the leaze is smiling, On and on beguiling Crisply-cropping sheep; Under boughs of brushwood Linking tree and tree In a shade of lushwood, There caressed we! II. Hemmed by city walls That outshut the sunlight, In a foggy dun light, Where the footstep falls With a pit-pat wearisome In its cadency On the flagstones drearisome There pressed we! III. Where in wild-winged crowds Blown birds show their whiteness Up against the lightness Of the clammy clouds; By the random river Pushing to the sea, Under bents that quiver There shall rest we.
Texts 15 9. Amabel
I marked her ruined hues, Her custom-straitened views, And asked, ‘Can there indwell My Amabel?’ I looked upon her gown, Once rose, now earthen brown; The change was like the knell Of Amabel. Her step’s mechanic ways Had lost the life of May’s; Her laugh, once sweet in swell, Spoilt Amabel. I mused: ‘Who sings the strain I sang ere warmth did wane? Who thinks its numbers spell His Amabel?’ – Knowing that, though Love cease, Love’s race shows no decrease; All find in dorp or dell An Amabel. – I felt that I could creep To some housetop, and weep That Time the tyrant fell Ruled Amabel! I said (the while I sighed That love like ours had died), ‘Fond things I’ll no more tell To Amabel,
‘But leave her to her fate, And fling across the gate, “Till the Last Trump, farewell, O Amabel!”’ 16 10. He Abjures Love
At last I put off love, For twice ten years The daysman of my thought, And hope, and doing; Being ashamed thereof, And faint of fears And desolations, wrought In his pursuing, Since first in youthtime those Disquietings That heart-enslavement brings To hale and hoary, Became my housefellows, And, fool and blind, I turned from kith and kind To give him glory. I was as children be Who have no care; I did not shrink or sigh, I did not sicken; But lo, Love beckoned me, And I was bare, And poor, and starved, and dry, And fever-stricken.
Too many times ablaze With fatuous fires, Enkindled by his wiles To new embraces, Did I, by wilful ways And baseless ires, Return the anxious smiles Of friendly faces. No more will now rate I The common rare, The midnight drizzle dew, The gray hour golden, The wind a yearning cry, The faulty fair, Things dreamt, of comelier hue Than things beholden! … – I speak as one who plumbs Life’s dim profound, One who at length can sound Clear views and certain. But – after love what comes? A scene that lours, A few sad vacant hours, And then, the Curtain. Thomas Hardy (1840–1928)
17 SUMMER DRESSES / STRANGER FRIENDS (bean piece 5) I used to hide under trees breathe out when the sky couldn’t see me and neither could they I would look at my stranger-friends through the brown and green, nails working through the soil and throat wrapping around itself I would look at the girls, too, losing breath in summer dresses – skirts wide and hearts full I think my eyes would have glossed two greenhouses flooded with water, when the voices of pals tugged me from the trees and from my friends with marigold smiles and summer skirts I want my heart to fill, too and I want to feel the air on my knees
Laurie Ward (b. 2002)
Biographies Nigerian-American soprano Francesca Chiejina is a recent graduate of the Jette Parker Young Artists Programme at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. In the 2022/23 season she sings High Priestess Aida at the Royal Opera House and Lauretta Il Trittico with Scottish Opera. She also sings Górecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs for Royal Ballet: New Crystal Pite at the Royal Opera House and Tippett’s A Child of Our Time with the Cambridge Philharmonic Society.
Singaporean-British mezzo-soprano Fleur Barron was awarded the 2022 Schubert Prize alongside Brigitte Fassbaender by the Schubertíada. She is a current Rising Star of Het Concertgebouw, and is an Artistic Partner of the Orquesta Sinfónica del Principado de Asturias in Oviedo for several seasons beginning in 2022/23. A passionate interpreter of opera, chamber music, and concert works ranging from the baroque to the contemporary, Fleur is mentored by Barbara Hannigan.
On the concert platform she has recently sung Berg’s Seven Early Songs with both the BBC Philharmonic (conducted by Nicholas Collon) and Sinfonia of London (conducted by John Wilson) at the BBC Proms. She performed Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs with Imperial College Symphony Orchestra at Cadogan Hall, Bach’s St John Passion with Huddersfield Choral Society and Manchester Camerata, Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915 with the BBC Philharmonic and with the Royal Northern Sinfonia, and Handel’s Messiah with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra at the Royal Albert Hall.
Highlights of the 2022/23 season include the title role in Kaija Saariaho’s Adriana Mater with the San Francisco Symphony, conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen and directed by Peter Sellars, Debussy’s La damoiselle élue with Esa-Pekka Salonen and Orchestre de Paris, Stravinsky’s Pulcinella on tour with Barbara Hannigan and the Göteborgs Symfoniker, Berio’s Folksongs with Sir Mark Elder and the Junge Deutsche Philharmonie, Beethoven Missa Solemnis with Thomas Hengelbrock at the Aix-en-Provence Festival, Bruckner’s Te Deum with Vasily Petrenko and the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic, and Mahler’s Rückert-Lieder with Orquesta Sinfonica di Oviedo. On the recital platform, Fleur partners with regular collaborator Julius Drake for concerts in Amsterdam, Paris, Oviedo, Milan, Turin, Copenhagen and a US recital tour, and she returns to Wigmore Hall and the Oxford Lieder Festival with duo partner Kunal Lahiry.
Francesca studied at the University of Michigan with Martha Sheil and James Paterson, and at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama with Sue McCulloch.
An alumna of Chetham’s School of Music, King’s College London and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, Natalie Burch is a dedicated song pianist and curator, interested in the political and social intersection of music and its audiences. Natalie is committed to programming compelling and challenging recitals which she regularly presents in recital at festivals across Europe. She is also a passionate advocate for increasing female representation in the song-piano world. Much in demand as a song specialist, Natalie regularly collaborates with a number of award-winning artists. Recent and future projects include her debut at the Aldeburgh Festival alongside Lotte Betts-Dean and James Way, a performance of Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov’s Silent Songs at the Oxford Lieder Festival and the release of her debut disc with Camilla Harris on Linn Records. She is a Samling Artist, winner of the Maureen Lehane prize for piano at Wigmore Hall and is an alumna of the Britten–Pears, Leeds Lieder and International Lied Festival Zeist Young Artist programmes. Natalie is Associate Artistic Director of the Oxford Lieder Festival 2024 and founder of the Devon Song Festival, which returns following a pandemic-induced hiatus in 2023.
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PRESTO Editor’s choice
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In lifelong seclusion in rural County Wicklow, Ina Boyle created a legacy of song – tender, often melancholy, illuminated by an exquisite sense for harmony. ‘I think it is most courageous of you to go on with such little recognition,’ wrote Vaughan Williams to his pupil. ‘The only thing to say is that it does come finally.’ Amid the 2020 pandemic, Iain Burnside gathered three superb Irish singers at London’s Wigmore Hall. Recorded in less than five hours, the resulting 80 minutes of music unveil a composer who is one of Ireland’s ‘invisible heroines’. Half a century after Boyle’s death, is Vaughan Williams’ prediction at last coming true?
In Jeremy Sams’ new English-language singing version of Britten’s Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo, the passionate sentiments are liberated from the safe historical distance of the Italian Renaissance and unveiled in a way that was not possible in 1940, when Britten wrote the cycle – his first for his partner Peter Pears.
‘a real box of delights – the Irish composer emerges as a hugely versatile voice and a natural melodist’ — Presto Classical, September 2021, EDITOR’S CHOICE
Tenor Elgan Llŷr Thomas presents it alongside Michael Tippett’s equally ardent Songs for Achilles and a short item by W. Denis Browne, a close friend of the poet Rupert Brooke, as well as premiere recordings of four Brooke settings by Ruth Gipps and a new song-cycle by Thomas himself, to poems by Andrew McMillan. Tackling themes of love, shame, acceptance, war and death, the programme traverses a history of male homosexuality from necessary discretion to the (relatively) liberated present. New in June 2023
James Dillon: Tanz/haus Red Note Ensemble / Geoffrey Paterson
Calen-o: Songs from the North of Ireland Carolyn Dobbin, Iain Burnside
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Coming almost a decade and a half after the last CDs devoted to James Dillon’s music, this twinned pair of digital releases from Delphian Records and Red Note Ensemble presents two major works written for and premiered by the ensemble in the last six years. Tanz/haus: triptych 2017 is one of Dillon’s richest recent conceptions: a 45-minute meditation on dance as a form of ‘trembling’, featuring electric guitar and – as in so much of Dillon’s recent music – a pre-recorded electronic track of immense mystery and power. The work secured for Dillon his fifth Royal Philharmonic Society award: an astonishing tally, unequalled by any living composer. EMBLEMATA: Carnival (released in parallel on Delphian DCD34309) is a compellingly sustained whole built up from a series of character pieces tailored to the imaginative as well as technical capacities of the Red Note musicians.
A passionate advocate for the art music of her native Northern Ireland, mezzosoprano Carolyn Dobbin has put together this programme that attests to a rich yet little-known tradition. Who knew that doyen of Anglican church music Charles Wood was in fact an Ulsterman, and a fine composer of art song? Premiere recordings of Wood and of the forward-looking Hamilton Harty are interleaved with songs by Joan Trimble and Howard Ferguson in a journey of delightful discovery.
‘All gratitude to Red Note Ensemble, who, in high-definition audio, perform these works with razor precision’ — Gramophone, May 2023
‘With her rich palette of tone and colour, Dobbin knows how to communicate text and music, while Iain Burnside’s accompaniments are beautifully managed. Both voice and piano are finely captured and well balanced’ — BBC Music Magazine, May 2018
Also available on Delphian Héloïse Werner: Phrases with Lawrence Power, Colin Alexander, Laura Snowden, Calum Huggan, Daniel Shao, Amy Harman
Battle Cry: She Speaks Helen Charlston mezzo-soprano, Toby Carr theorbo DCD34283
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PRESTO Editor’s choice
Editor’s choice
Luminous and daring, this celebration of Héloïse Werner’s multifaceted gifts is nourished by rich dualities. Phrases reveals Werner as both singer and composer, as an artist shaped by both her native France and her adopted UK, and as a soloist of captivating individuality who is also an intrepid collaborator. The solos and duos that make up the album comprise five of Werner’s own compositions, four of Georges Aperghis’s avant-garde classic Récitations, and six newly commissioned works, by composers ranging from Elaine Mitchener and Cheryl Frances-Hoad to Nico Muhly and Oliver Leith. The calibre of Héloïse’s instrumental partners in the duos reflects the degree to which this extraordinary young performer is already valued and cherished by her peers. ‘a soprano of extraordinary abilities, possessing a seemingly inexhaustible expressive range, [and] a composer and arranger of subtle imagination … Delphian’s sound is first-rate, catching the full dynamic range and every nuance of Werner’s voice’ — Gramophone, June 2022, EDITOR’S CHOICE Erik Chisholm (1904–1965): Songs Mhairi Lawson, Nicky Spence, Michael Mofidian, Iain Burnside
Awards 2023 PRESTO Recordings of the Year 2022 – Finalist
Editor’s choice
This powerful yet understated recital of seventeenth-century and modern works aims to revisit but also to re-balance the obsession of earlier music with female abandonment and lament. The stories of women such as Dido and Ariadne have been told and retold throughout history. Mezzo-soprano Helen Charlston reconsiders the assumed helplessness of those often seen as being left behind by male adventure and success. A recent work commissioned for Charlston from the composer Owain Park further takes up the challenge of giving ‘abandoned women’ their own platform, as well as exploring new possibilities for an instrumental pairing – that of voice and theorbo – that remains little explored in contemporary music. ‘surely one of the most exciting voices in the new generation of British singers’ — Gramophone, June 2022, EDITOR’S CHOICE Winner in the vocal category at the BBC Music Awards 2023
Insomnia: a nocturnal voyage in song William Berger, Iain Burnside
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Erik Chisholm made his home as a musician in South Africa, but it was in the Gaelic folk-tunes of his native Scotland that he found lifelong inspiration for his songs. Modern yet instantly accessible and engaging, and revelling in the Scots language, their apparent simplicity belies the composer’s sophisticated craftsmanship. Pianist Iain Burnside and three of the brightest stars in the firmament of Scottish singers bring out the individual characters of these pieces, by turns haunting, tender and irreverent, making of each one a uniquely coloured little jewel.
For his solo debut on disc, baritone William Berger has devised an ingenious sequence of seventeen songs describing a sleepless night experienced by a man who reflects on his love for an unnamed woman. From Viennese classicism to fin-de-siècle Romanticism, shadowy English pastoral to the contemporary worlds of Richard Rodney Bennett and Raymond Yiu, this wideranging programme is brought to nuanced life by an outstanding young singer.
‘eclectically characterful musical slivers, many of them indebted to Scottish traditional music, all imbued with an independent, sometimes musically spicy spirit … Strong and sensitive performances’ — Irish Times, July 2021
‘plays out its chronological narrative … with logical and psychological inevitability. Berger sustains a magnetic affection throughout the varied sequence, aided by Iain Burnside’s deft pianism’ — The Scotsman, July 2012
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