Firstly, one of the most famous poems in the English Language, Keats’ sonnet On first looking into Chapman’s Homer. It goes thus:
Much have I travelled in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet never did I breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific – and with all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise-
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
Why the poem? Well, I know of nothing that distills better the moment, in reading, in listening to music, in looking at a picture, when the reader, the listener, the gazer feels that they have had the stunning experience that only art can communicate. Such an experience occurred to me in the opening moments of the last Thursday concert of the Winter season at the Museum given by the baritone Thomas Platt and his piano accompanist Keval Shah. I have delayed writing about it since I knew that I was going to hear the English Touring Opera in Stravinsky’s A Rake’s Progress at Curve this week and I felt I needed to hear some other operatic voices to verify that I was not exaggerating when I thought that last Thursday I had come across a voice that had reminded me of some of the great singers of the last 60 years.Was I delusional to think that here and there I was reminded of Thomas Allen, of Fischer- Dieskau, even a whiff of Boris Christoff such was the range of the voice and the singer’s responsiveness to the word? Well, I think not. This was voice totally under control across a wide range, dramatic but also capable of great beauty.
All of this became apparent from the very first item in the programme, a James Macmillan setting of a poem by the Scottish poet William Soutar called The Children, a poem describing the horrors of the Spanish Civil War. Its powerful simplicity was given music that was immensely moving in the straightforwardness that at times is so characteristic of the composer. It was made all the more powerful here by the singer declaiming the opening whilst slightly outside the hall and thus quite separate from the piano, so giving to the performance as he advanced towards the platform a sense of a processional with the piano picking up the horror of the scene. It reminded me of Britten who in works such as Curlew River used this device to great effect.
After this the credentials of the pair as singer and pianist of German and French song were established in songs from Schumann’s Kerner Lieder followed by Poulenc’s Le Fraicheur et le feu. Here there seemed to be an instant and completely confident response to the varied tone of the songs.
Then we were in the last part of the concert presented with the often harrowing world of racial suffering in the American South in a series of American songs, Shawn E. Okpebholo’s Two Black Churches, Ballad of Birmingham and The Rain, Richard Farina’s Birmingham Sunday, Margaret Bond’s The Negro Speaks of Rivers and William Grant Stills’s Grief . These were sung and played with great feeling. Particularly striking in the first was the expressive writing for piano. In the second the singing was wonderfully fluid at times and in the third I will remember for a long time the softness of the rendering of the line ‘I’ll sing it so softly, it’ll do no one wrong. There was much one could have written about a number of felicities in the last two of the songs listed though I was grateful to reach the vitality of the final piece in the concert, Florence Price’s energetic My Dream which effectively brought the concert to a moderately up beat ending and ensured that we did not go home sobbing our hearts out. It was a triumphant ending to a triumphant concert and I would dearly like to hear both artists again in the not too distant future, perhaps in a mainly English programme, with one of the Britten song cycles at its centre.
So that is the end of the Winter season in which there have been quite a number of outstanding concerts. Top of the heap to my mind were the concerts given by following . Firstly, there was the astonishing Pelleas Ensemble consisting of the seemingly unlikely combination of flute ,viola and harp which made of transcribed works utterly memorable music. Then our director partnered by the pianist Antoino Oyaizabal gave a delightful concert centred on the music of Madeline Dring but culminating in beautiful, beautiful arrangements by Vaughan Williams of English folk songs.
That was followed several weeks later by Helene Clement and Alasdair Beatson Viola and Piano taking a mezmerising musical journey through the relationships that Frank Bridge and Imogen Holst had with Benjamin Britten that culminated in a performance of the latter’s deep and knotty masterpiece Lachrymae, reflections on a song of Dowland that was as revealing as any that I have heard. And lastly there was the concert reviewed above.
So, we were hardly lacking in music making to remember. However, in truth I finished thinking that this winter series was not really one of the most memorable and that the reason was not hard to gauge. It lay in the self evident fact that music for string trio, quartet and quintet, which surely harbours by far the greatest number of works of genius to be found in chamber music, was totally absent from the programme and I don’t think I can remember that happening any time in the past. When it was coupled with the exclusion of piano works not composed by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, there was thus a huge chunk of the most inspired chamber music rendered unavailable for the season and that that was a hole not to be filled by such things as music for massed brass,at least not for me.
Lastly, though, we should all be hugely grateful that we have people like Nicholas Daniel and Kevin Rush willing to put so much time into making sure that Leicester gets music of real quality year after year particularly in the present atmosphere of mild hostility to the arts by people who should know better.
The Diary of a Leicester Concert-goer 