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Simon Tavener October 26, 2005

27th October - Christopher Maltman & Graham Johnson
Mahler, Debussy, Schumann

This was a truly exceptional evening – a combination of exquisite piano playing and some of the best singing that modern audiences can encounter. The reaction that both performers received at the end of the performance was ecstatic and graciously repaid with two wonderful encores.

Christopher Maltman has grown immensely since I first encountered him at the Cardiff Singer of the World competition. His technique and temperament are ideally suited to the intimacy of the recital. His voice is capable of enormous power and the tenderest of emotion. His programme was the ideal showcase for all facets of his instrument.

Graham Johnson is the most sought-after pianists working in his field. His work, particularly for the Hyperion lieder recordings, is exemplary. He is the master of the keyboard – responded to both composer and performer with equal care and attention to detail. I can honestly say that I have never before heard playing of that calibre in Oxford.

Starting with a series of Schumann narrative songs, Maltman had immediate impact with his willing audience. The highlight was Belsatzar – a demanding setting requiring the full range of voice and emotion. Maltman was more than equal to the challenge – exploiting his talents to their fullest.

The highlight for all in the hall was his performance of the Mahler Ruckert Lieder. More often performed by female singers, this was a revelatory encounter. From the opening bars through to the final chords, we were taken on an emotional journey through the pieces – every nuance was subtly underlined by both musicians. All around me felt that the time was right for this performance to be captured on disc in the very near future.

The second half contained a wide range of French song. Maltman is clearly a talented linguist – equally at home in German and French. He has a natural ability to communicate, not only with his voice but also with his body. It was in the Poulenc songs which ended the programme that this came most fully to the fore. A series of typically witty and quirky settings allowed Maltman to show an affinity for comedy for the first time in the evening. It was the perfect ending.

Or so we thought. A further work by Reynaldo Hahn followed – with some of the most delicate singing of the evening. Again the audience responded with warmth and enthusiasm. A final song followed – a comic gem from Debussy. It left us all fully entertained and convinced that we had witnessed a truly masterful recital.

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Simon Tavener October 23, 2005

21st October - Jonathan Lemalu (bass/baritone) and Sholto Kynoch (piano)

Songs by Schumann, Fauré, Brahms and Bolcom, Holywell Music Room


It is often hard to make Lieder come alive for an audience. The absence of setting, costume and gesture forces the singer to convey a lot of meaning through words that are not the native tongue of those in the hall. It is all too easy for an audience member to sit following the text and not focussing on the emotional power of the sound world being created by the vocalist and the pianist.

At times, I felt that Jonathan Lemalu was too restricted by the artificiality of the conventions of giving a recital. He is a natural performer with a quick wit and a natural affinity with his audiences. Particularly when singing Schumann’s Dichterlieder, he seemed somewhat ill at ease – almost appearing to want to burst free and allow his body to express the feelings the songs were meant to evoke.

His voice is world-class. His ability to generate the necessary variations of tone, volume and texture makes him a much sought-after artist. He was able to shade his performance with both delicacy and power. The reaction at the end of the evening was ecstatic from a large audience who had clearly been wowed by all that he had presented.

His French art songs were the weakest numbers in the programme – he did not seem fully comfortable with the language and this rather coloured his performance. Once into the German songs (by Schumann and Brahms), it was clear that he was more at home – communicating with greater ease.

The Quilter Shakespeare songs were excellent, but his performance of a selection of Cabaret songs by American composer William Bolcom was the revelation of the evening. Lemalu relaxed his performing style and gave outstanding accounts of these witty and moving pieces.

Sholto Kynoch gave excellent support from the piano. One of the hardest challenges for any pianist is to act as a sympathetic accompanist – but he clearly has the intuitive response to both music and singer to allow him to succeed.

All in all an excellent evening of song – more Bolcom for me please!

Friday, 28th October – Susan Young (soprano), Maciek O’Shea (baritone) & Iain Farrington (piano) performing Shumann, Fauré, Duparc & Strauss. Jacqueline du Pré Music Building.

Many moons had passed since I last stepped into the rather modern auditorium within the Jacqueline du Pré Music Building. This was to be my formal introduction to Lieder, a genre of German classical songs derived from poetry. What a pleasant little concert it turned out to be. A collection of simple (the piano music was generally light and uncomplicated) ditties beautifully sung to whet the appetite.

As an hors d’œuvre we had music by Henri Duparc (L’invitation au voyage, Sérénade and Phidylé) and Gabriel Fauré (Nell, Rêve d’amour, Notre amour, Sylvie). Susan Young and Maciek O’Shea have delightful voices and they sing with the fervour and expression appropriate to the lyrics. These poems of love and devotion are of a high calibre from a literary viewpoint but are also very moving to an old-fashioned romantic like myself.

Our main course was the “star attraction” of the evening, “Myrten” by Robert Schumann, a relatively long collection of songs which may be construed as a story. We were given a succinct introduction to the piece by Iain Farrington. He did an admirable job of describing the story of two lovers who part but are reunited at the end. A happy ending! The music varies in tempo and intensity in accordance with the lyrics, which flow between elation and heart-wrenching despondence. Once again Susan Young and Maciek O’Shea sang wonderfully in their roles as the young woman and young man respectively. It was compelling listening.

Finally, as dessert, we had Susan Young’s sweet voice singing Ruhe, meine Seele, Cäcile and Morgen by Richard Strauss. Beautiful music, excellent singing! What can I say, it was a rich pudding indeed.

Lieder is something I would recommend not only to classical music lovers but also to those who just appreciate good singing and music. It was an enjoyable and relaxing evening for which I wholeheartedly thank the performers.

SKM 27 Oct 2005

I freely admit that I know less about German Romantic song than perhaps I should, and so was a little surprised by the huge turnout at the Holywell, until I realised that the performers at tonight’s concert were both quite famous international figures in this sphere. The first half began with a selection of three Mendelssohn songs, starting, appropriately with Auf Flügeln des Gesanges, in which the singer promises to transport his beloved to beautiful places by the power of song. Luckily, the Dresden-born baritone Olaf Bär has a voice which could plausibly make this claim: I was not surprised to read in my later research that he is considered to be one of the foremost Lieder interpreters of his generation. Certainly he has the power and sensitivity required, without the overpoweringness and slightly irritating excessive vibrato that puts a lot of people off classical vocal and operatic music.

The main event of the evening was Robert Schumann’s Liederkreiss (op.39), a set of twelve songs only two or three could not be fairly described as the product of a troubled Gothic mind. The mood is primarily one of loss and/or longing (though, of course, not speaking much German I had to rely on the printed translations booklet to know exactly what was being lost or longed-for), but there are also moments of drama, such as the third song, Waldesgespräch, in which the singer takes on the role of both the helpful/slightly lecherous gentleman in the forest and the man-trapping witch Lorelei of German mythology who claims him as her victim. Communicating these things to a non-native audience, as it were, seems to take a lot of eyebrow work, a technique which Bär performs well, though being someone more accustomed to amplified rock music these days, I suspect that it may have become necessary due to the classical recital convention of not gesticulating or dancing about much on stage. At any rate, it is the music that people come for, and Schumann is a fine composer of songs. He has a reputation for a somewhat foursquare rhythmical style, dividing his music up into neat brackets of equal length, but as he lived at a time when it was becoming increasingly acceptable to do the harmonically unexpected, and took the opportunity, there is no element of predictability about the songs, each of which is a pleasing little piece of art.

The same, for my money, cannot be said for Brahms, whose settings of a selection of German folk songs in the second half of the evening are a rather staid, porridge-for-the-ears affair. Not unpleasant, but unmemorable melodies, though that may be as much a reflection of the source material as the composer himself. At any rate, they are well sung tonight, with a knowing wink and a chuckle (metaphorically – each song is about a girl, though not necessarily the same one) and I did have a thought which is that, since the booklet only contained tranlations and not transcriptions of the Brahms songs, and there was only about two syllables worth of space where the translation gives ‘sold for liquor’, I can only surmise that this very specific type of commerce is something for which there is a single, concise word in German. I can’t be sure, but I’d be pleased if it were true.

The interval, to go back in time and out onto a tangent, prompted me for the first time ever, to go for a swift half at Holywells, the bar/restaurant which used to be Blackwells music shop, and which I hadn’t visited since it was. I was pleased to discover it had a selection of real ales, when I had always taken it for the kind of place that wouldn’t. So I overcame a modicum of snobbery in my own life tonight, and I hope you don’t mind me having shared that with you.

Anyway, the final set of the evening was five songs by Richard Strauss, the composer who (sorry, here comes another tangent) is most famous these days for the brassy fanfare used on the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey (but was not alive when the film was produced, unlike György Ligeti, who wrote the creepy atmospheric music that was also featured, and sued the production company when he went to see the film and discovered they had used his music without even asking him). Richard Strauss was one of the last Romantic composers, and these songs reflect the greater freedom that composers of the time allowed themselves, while still being recognisably of the genre. What left most impression on me about some of these songs was the sense of slightly uncomfortable stillness, a difficult thing to pull off successfully. However, I missed the hallmarks of the Schumannisch (Schumannic…?) style of composition from earlier in the evening, the neat, shapely melodies, the unexpected sharp tonic or flat seventh at the end of a phrase that kept you on your toes when you thought the music had reached home, so was happy to hear another of his songs, Widnung, as an encore (which Bär introduced by talking to the audience for the first time in the concert. It still felt a little strange being at an entirely banter-free gig, but you didn’t want to read an anthropology report).

The crowd went wild, within limits, and the performers came back for a final bow, and you’ll have noticed at this point that I haven’t even mentioned the pianist, Julius Drake. I’m sorry, this is true, but one of the sad facts of nature is that when you are a piano accompanist, the better you do your task the less there is to say about it, much like the incidental music in a film. So take it that he is a top class accompanist, well worthy of sharing tonight’s stage. I left the hall with atomised bits of Classical Teutonic cadences swirling around my head, which I imagine goes to show that no one song was particularly the stand-out for me, but rather it was a satisfying performance all round, even if some of the material left a little to be desired.

David Hart 20 Oct 2005

15th October - Ailish Tynan (sop.), Andrew Kennedy (ten.) with Iain Burnside (piano). Songs by Schubert, Grainger, Weir, Copland & Strauss.

The Oxford Lieder Festival is now a prestigious, well-conceived celebration of the rich art of sung poetry - the complex symbiosis of word, voice and - lest we forget – piano - and this concert was an excellent first-night of the festival. Ailish Tynan, soprano, Andrew Kennedy, tenor, and Iain Burnside, piano, triumphed with renditions of works by Schubert, Britten, Grainger, Strauss, Weir, and more Britten, and the concert was preceded with a fine introductory talk given by an excellent translator of Lieder, Richard Stokes. The concert’s programme was well balanced, offering respite from the melancholic drama of Schubert and thoughtful introspections of Pushkin’s The Poet’s Echo, set by Britten, with the jaunty rusticity of folksongs arranged by Grainger, redolent of great intelligence and humanity. The same respite was offered in the second half, when troubled undercurrents in the songs of Strauss and Weir were offset by the lighter fare of Britten’s folksong arrangements.

The opening Schubert group began with Kennedy’s and Burnside’s stormily wind-swept Der Schiffer, when surges of insistent semiquavers, swelling from the piano, raged impotently against a focussed tenor voice, a life-line of clear sound. Soothing gentleness followed imposing firmness with Du bist die Ruh, sung with a kind of precise tranquillity by Tynan. This first group ended with a sixth song, the under-performed Epistel: Musikalisches Schwank, a jocular letter berating a friend for his silence, in which Kennedy displayed a capacity for high-spirited virtuosity and witty caprice, soaring gracefully in the tenor’s upper-register.

The excellence of the opening group was maintained throughout the concert: both singers gave moving and virtuoso performances with the excellent, and no less important accompaniment of Burnside. Singing Lieder is always an emotional tour de force. A single stanza of a single Lied sometimes portrays a wide range of emotions which demands an equivalent variety of vocal qualities from the singer, and these Kennedy displayed in abundance: though more particularly, I felt, in the English works, Grainger or Britten, than the Schubert, perhaps because it was in the English songs that Kennedy could deploy a winsome cheeriness, a quality he semi-acted as well as sang, that enlivened his performance even more so than the virtuoso in some of the Schubert Lieder. Though his winsome cheeriness sometimes turned into the kind of singer’s smile that appears a little too mask-like, and sometimes appeared a little out of place, as in the Judith Weir songs that had deaths often at the end of each poem: when he relaxed, the sense of almost all-pervading sorrow, with which many Lieder are infused, became more real and powerful.

Stillness is a quality extremely characteristic of many Lieder, and in some songs Tynan captured a vocal quality that suggested a lived-in timelessness, and she achieved this strikingly in the gorgeous setting by Strauss of Morgen!…, a moving poem by the Scottish-German, John Henry Mackay. Stillness in Lieder is often imbued with a menacing potential - perhaps the equivalent to a Pinteresque pause – when conveyed is what is left unsaid, unsung. Kennedy captured this type of intensity in tranquillity especially well in the folksongs by Britten, achieving vocally the kind of weighted etherealness, especially in the closing song, Waly, waly, which is the envy of every tenor and one of the qualities found in a great performer of Lieder. It would be possible to remark on some minor infelicities of German pronunciation, especially by Kennedy, which occasionally though not consistently appeared, but these did not detract from the overall excellent marriage between text and music, which is the essence of singing Lieder.

Oliver Morris 14 Oct 2005

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