In a concert recorded at the Cheltenham Festival earlier this summer, Caroline MacPhie (soprano), Allan Clayton (tenor) and the Elias String Quartet with Tom Poster (piano) perform song cycles by Faure and Vaughan Williams, together with the world premiere of Ian Venables' 'Remember This', a setting of a poem by Andrew Motion.
Did anyone else hear this?
The Faure - La bonne chanson - in particular received a wonderfully concentrated performance from Caroline MacPhie. I'd forgotten what a wonderful cycle it is, and in this version for soprano and piano quintet (am I imagining it, or is there yet another version with a double bass part?) there is a real sense of blissful freshness, fully realised in this broadcast.
The RVW - On Wenlock Edge - was for my taste a bit hasty at times, but it was good to hear the piece again.
Ian Venables' cycle, for soprano, tenor and piano quintet, has to contend with a pretty ghastly (at times) poem about the demise of the Queen Mother. Musically it rather outstayed its welcome too, and I found myself yearning for a bit of the grit that makes RVW (and Finzi and Gurney, for that matter) memorable. It was all beautifully laundered English pastoral, every cowpat carefully airbrushed out. A pot-pourri of all the safe bits of interwar English music, softened up with a gentle hint of not-quite American patterning - perfect background music. I've encountered some of Venables' other songs and found them more gutsy, so this was a bit of a disappointment.
Where does a writer of (loosely) art-song fit into twenty-first century musical culture? Is it an almost-dead art-form, now used only by composers at the more conservative end of the spectrum? I ask partly because I listened last night to Warlock's The Curlew, and that work, now more than eight decades old, strikes me as both more strikingly 'edgy' and more 'authentic' than Remember This.
Did anyone else hear this?
The Faure - La bonne chanson - in particular received a wonderfully concentrated performance from Caroline MacPhie. I'd forgotten what a wonderful cycle it is, and in this version for soprano and piano quintet (am I imagining it, or is there yet another version with a double bass part?) there is a real sense of blissful freshness, fully realised in this broadcast.
The RVW - On Wenlock Edge - was for my taste a bit hasty at times, but it was good to hear the piece again.
Ian Venables' cycle, for soprano, tenor and piano quintet, has to contend with a pretty ghastly (at times) poem about the demise of the Queen Mother. Musically it rather outstayed its welcome too, and I found myself yearning for a bit of the grit that makes RVW (and Finzi and Gurney, for that matter) memorable. It was all beautifully laundered English pastoral, every cowpat carefully airbrushed out. A pot-pourri of all the safe bits of interwar English music, softened up with a gentle hint of not-quite American patterning - perfect background music. I've encountered some of Venables' other songs and found them more gutsy, so this was a bit of a disappointment.
Where does a writer of (loosely) art-song fit into twenty-first century musical culture? Is it an almost-dead art-form, now used only by composers at the more conservative end of the spectrum? I ask partly because I listened last night to Warlock's The Curlew, and that work, now more than eight decades old, strikes me as both more strikingly 'edgy' and more 'authentic' than Remember This.
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