The Oxford Lieder Festival has become rightly recognised as so much more than its name suggests. Should there have been any remaining doubts, they would have been comprehensively shattered by this recital. The soprano Patricia Petibon, together with pianist Susan Manoff, gave us all-encompassing musical and dramatic entertainment, an emotional roller-coaster, a spectacular journey through music of French, Spanish and Latin American inspiration, and ultimately a wonderfully exhilarating experience.
One of the festival’s strokes of innovative genius is its Emerging Artists programme, enabling young artists, having successfully auditioned, to perform in the opening fifteen minutes of this year’s evening concerts. From his first, resonant notes, the Korean bass Wonsick Oh filled the Holywell Music Room with richness and warmth, sensitively accompanied by pianist Aron Goldin. Oh is clearly an outstanding talent. His mature interpretation of Tchaikovsky’s 'None but the lonely heart', from Goethe’s 'Wilhelm Meister', captured the sense of eternal suffering that comes from longing for a beloved, achingly echoed by Oh in the unremitting despair of Rachmaninov’s setting of Pushkin’s poem 'Oh do not sing, fair maiden'. The duo’s short programme was further enriched by two Korean songs. In 'Resonance' by Hak Jon Yun, Oh was able to show a wider range, changing his timbre seamlessly from moonlit calm to tragic lyricism, the accompaniment luscious and romantic. Dong-Su Shin’s 'Oh, Mountain!' is a sombre love song to the mountain the composer had to leave because of war. Here, Goldin’s velvet pianissimo reflected the intimacy of the farewell, before leading into Oh’s dramatic change of mood as the sense of loss was transformed into optimism and hope. Bravely, Oh exhorted the mountain to “take care!” until the poet’s return. This was a song for our time, and a performance of the most profound humanity.
Patricia Petibon began with two songs by Canteloube. 'Au pré de la rose' gave us a modest taste of what was to come. After the delicacy of the scene with doves bathing in the water, Petibon swaying in visual illustration, she ended with a long, expressive – and unexpected – sigh, turning to gaze inside the piano as if it had been the stream. One could almost hear an involuntary, sympathetic “Aaaah!” from the audience. In the second song, 'Shepherdess, if you love me', with Manoff’s sparkling piano runs, Petibon positively danced, now light, now foot-stamping.
We knew then that this was to be no ordinary recital.
A completely different mood was struck in Reynaldo Hahn’s 'Three days of vintaging (harvest)'. Petibon could be mystical, spectral, almost sepulchral, as the suddenly chorale-like accompaniment tolled out the 'Dies Irae' motif over the coffin. And by the end, there she was, vacantly staring ahead into nothingness, love itself lost, harvested. From there, we were transported into fantasy. During Manoff’s wafting, flowing piano solo ('Lok Gweltaz' by the Breton composer Yann Tiersen, of Amélie fame), Petibon herself, now in pure white, wafted a sizeable fish around, wailing into the piano, improvising over Manoff’s accompaniment, and teasing the audience so that by the end they seemed hardly to know whether to tremble in anxiety or applaud in laughter. The vocalising “Oh, oh, oh!” continued at the start of Nicolas Bacri’s 'To the sea' – the story of a fish (aha, we thought – the fish again), Petibon’s imploring tone finally transformed into the sunshine of a major key.
The props kept coming. Manoff’s rippling piano introduced Thierry Eschaich’s 'The song of tomorrows', Petibon holding a substantial conch shell to her ear as she sang with understated hesitation of uncertainty and the unforeseen. In Tiersen’s 'Yuzin', feather-light playing from Manoff vividly conveyed the impulsive twisting and turning of the next fish brought onto the stage by Petibon (now wearing a red nose – why not?) who at almost every turn engaged the audience with delectable, unpredictable surprises. One that didn’t succeed, however, was the melodramatic, almost vaudeville rendering of 'Danny Boy'. After the luscious playing of the piano introduction, the intimacy, hush, simple beauty and deathly quietness of the song were rather lost in this interpretation.
Yet from that moment, Petibon’s stunning originality, comedic wit, and sheer exuberance on stage returned to be put brilliantly at the service of the rest of the recital.
Poulenc’s 'The lads who’re off to the fair' was a virtuoso, patter-song performance, Petibon now in collapsible top hat and giant white bow tie. She captured perfectly the composer’s wicked humour in her utterly convincing music-hall pastiche, a pure delight. The mood changed again as Manoff, in her majestic piano solo, 'Oriental' by Granados, began with her haunting reference to Schubert’s 'Gretchen at the spinning-wheel'. The piano once again effectively conveyed the atmosphere in Fernando Obradors’ 'El Vito', based on an Andalusian folk song, in which Manoff busily evoked people on the village square but also, in the ominous tread of the slow-moving melody in the bass, the loneliness, the anger of old age, suddenly given acute expression in Petibon’s shriek of fury and frustration.
There was a North American element to the programme too. Aaron Copland intended in his 'Four Piano Blues' “a kind of musical naturalness that we have badly needed”, as the programme note informed us. Manoff was highly effective in her delicate, improvisatory, wistful, almost dreamy playing of No. 3 of the set (“Muted and sensuous” as Copland marked it). This was eloquent playing almost from a distant, imaginary world.
And then, the explosion…..
Petibon and Manoff reappeared in full chef’s attire, with a whole range of ingredients, for Leonard Bernstein’s 'La Bonne Cuisine', including soft toys appearing from the saucepan, what looked like a genuine oxtail (a rope), plastic fruit, animals, cooking implements, all at some point being either deposited on the stage or flung into the audience (“Bon appétit!” cried Petibon each time), until the stage was littered with the debris. This was pure slapstick, and hugely enjoyable. Musically, the Marseillaise and the theme from Love Story were wittily incorporated, while the performance on stage involved tasting mock soup, Petibon throwing up (virtually, of course) into the Steinway grand piano, Manoff (by now in evening tails with rabbit’s bobtail) taking photos of the demonic chef before being stabbed by her with a carrot and in return, stabbing Petibon with ….a banana (what else?). Yet despite all the circus antics, the music continued on its outrageous progress, both musicians totally in command of their voice and keyboard respectively. Bernstein, surely, would have loved it.
This took us cleverly into George Gershwin’s 'Prelude No. 2' and much-needed calm, the lullaby-like melody insistent over the blues harmonies, the right hand offering consolation to the haunting march of the left hand, the chromaticism resolving itself in Manoff’s intuitive, unmannered style to a peaceful resolution, yet with that hanging, indeterminate 7th at the end.
And finally, back to
It was a triumphant conclusion to a scintillating evening of pure cabaret.