Kathleen Ferrier - your favourite of her recordings

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Oh yes Roehre - must look out the record of the Sargent orchestration, one of my earliest Ferrier recordings.

Is it a significant reason now for this thread? I think she died in 1954, didn'tshe ?

1912-1953 (died October 8th, sixty years ago).

[salymap]

Thanks ferney, I had an idea it was 1954.

I was at home waiting to go into hospital. A friend/colleague phoned and said something I've learned to dread - "Are you sitting down, there's sad news"?

[jean]

Britten thought it did! Such a shame that studio recording is lost.

I'm genuinely surprised to discover that he actually wrote it for her, since the version I know is the 1961 (?) recording with Peter Pears, and the boy alto John Hahessy (later the tenor John Elwes).

But isn't it a bit like casting a girl as Tadzio?

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Britten thought it did! Such a shame that studio recording is lost.

- I thought jean was joking (hence my reference to Stravinsky's work with the same name). Oh yes: the specific sound that Britten wrote for was Ferrier's voice, even more so than Lucretia or the Spring Symphony. The enthusiasm with which he suggested that the work could (?"should"?) be sung by a male alto/counter tenor stems, I think, from his admiration for Deller and other voices that emerged in the '60s and the loss of the specific voice of his beloved friend - he so wanted the work to be recorded by Ferrier that he and DECCA made arrangements for it to be recorded in the hospital Ferrier was treated in. Sadly, too late.

[Mary Chambers]

I'm pretty sure that my mother heard Britten, Pears and Ferrier live in Abraham and Isaac. She definitely heard them in recital together. Pity that she's no longer here for me to check the details.

[Mary Chambers]

We also had "I know that my redeemer liveth" - not with Ferrier, but with Isobel Baillie, and almost inevitably the Mendelssohn "Oh for the wings of a dove" with you know who. Nostalgia!

Yes, both of those!

[mercia]

I expect you're already aware of this documentary

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CakiMlTfeUc

[slarty]

for me the Das lied Von der Erde with Barbirolli - a scratchy recording of a live performance, but it is great.
what might have been? the possibility of her going to Bayreuth to sing Brangaene in 1953.

[Barbirollians]

for me the Das lied Von der Erde with Barbirolli - a scratchy recording of a live performance, but it is great.
what might have been? the possibility of her going to Bayreuth to sing Brangaene in 1953.

That is a great record I agree.

[Barbirollians]

Brahms' Four Serious Songs in English in the 1948 orchestration by Sargent.
I'm afraid that any of her recordings on German texts is seriously marred by her pronunciation - beautifully sung Kindertotenlieder e.g., but for me out of bounds.

Her German was good enough for Bruno Walter and my University prize winning German scholar grandmother so it is good enough for me !

[Dave2002]

Her German was good enough for Bruno Walter and my University prize winning German scholar grandmother so it is good enough for me !

Possibly our friend Roehre is a native German speaker. There are/have been some wonderful non English speakers who are/were singers, but get them singing texts in English and almost any native English speaker will notice. Whether it matters to the listener will depend on how tolerant they are. Examples - Kim Borg in Barbirolli's Dream of Gerontius, Fischer Dieskau in Britten's War Requiem. I think I've also heard Placido Domingo doing English - can't remember where.

I'm not too fussed if the singing is good, but some might be.

[Roehre]

Possibly our friend Roehre is a native German speaker. There are/have been some wonderful non English speakers who are/were singers, but get them singing texts in English and almost any native English speaker will notice. Whether it matters to the listener will depend on how tolerant they are. Examples - Kim Borg in Barbirolli's Dream of Gerontius, Fischer Dieskau in Britten's War Requiem. I think I've also heard Placido Domingo doing English - can't remember where.

I'm not too fussed if the singing is good, but some might be.

I prefer DF-D not singing English or French, because it's in my ears simply awful, e.g.
There were/are IMO quite a couple of english-tongued singers with almost impeccable German pronunciations, I only have to mention Thomas Hampson, Gwyneth Jones , Bryn Terfel (his mother tongue is Welsh btw), Barbara Bonney, Renée Fleming, Jessey Norman and Kiri te Kanawa.
Unfortunately this doesn't apply to e.g. Kathleen Ferrier as well as Janet Baker

PS: is it a coincidence that the english-tongued singers which sprang to mind are not English?

[Mary Chambers]

I don't think DFD's poor English matters at all in War Requiem, since the fact that the singers are of different nationalities is an important dimension of the piece. Elsewhere, I'm not so happy with it.

Wasn't Christopher Pregardien's Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings recently chosen in Building A Library? Good as he is, I couldn't take his English.

[gurnemanz]

Gramophone once published a letter from me praising the ongoing Hyperion Schubert Lieder Edition but bemoaning the relatively low number of German native speakers involved. I am not too dogmatic about this really and sometimes even enjoy a foreign accent. I adore Vesselina Kasarova's Lieder disc and find that her less than perfect Bulgarian German makes the interpretations even more appealing.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Her German was good enough for Bruno Walter and my University prize winning German scholar grandmother so it is good enough for me !

My attitude, too, Barbie (except for the grandmother, as far as I know) - but then my own German pronunciation would probably turn the milk in a molkerei anyway. Roehre's point is a personal one and relates as much to Dave2002's lieder thread - the intensity of Ferrier's voice; the particular, individual colour of the intonation, the warmth, the beauty of the timbre - these make for qualities that are more important to me than authentic "diction", such that, say, as fine an artist as Christa Ludwig just doesn't begin to match.

This is, of course, another "personal" response - and one that stems from Ferrier's voice being with me for as long as I can remember (hers was the first "classical" voice I ever heard - there with the prevailing sound of early '60s pop Music). It's a sound that's "in" me: I can imagine it at any time I wish - a "default" setting in my intellectual and cultural "being".