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Cheltenham Music Festival 2008 (2) : Songs by Ralph Vaughan Williams, Percy Grainger, Benjamin Britten and George Butterworth. Matthew Rose (bass) & Gareth Hancock (piano). Pittville Pump Room, Cheltenham. 6.7.2008 (JQ)

Vaughan Williams: Songs of Travel
Grainger: Shallow Brown
Britten: Folk Song Arrangements: The Foggy, Foggy Dew; Salley Gardens; Oliver Cromwell
Butterworth: A Shropshire Lad


Recently I encountered the young British bass, Matthew Rose when I reviewed Sakari Oramo’s farewell performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in Birmingham. His strong, clear voice made an excellent impression in the large acoustic of Symphony Hall and I was keen to hear him in the more intimate atmosphere of the recital room.

This programme adroitly brought together a couple of the themes that Festival Director Meurig Bowen has chosen for his first Cheltenham Festival, namely the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Vaughan Williams and the Folk Revivalists. In the context of this programme it was particularly instructive to read Mr. Bowen’s fascinating essay in the programme book in which he outlined the links between Britten and Grainger and the part that folksong played in their respective creative outputs.

Matthew Rose, though still quite a young man, cuts an imposing figure. He is tall and has genuine physical presence. His voice is a large one and he showed us that he is able to sing with great power, yet he uses this vocal power intelligently and is just as capable of scaling the voice down, according to the requirements of the music.

The power was nowhere more in evidence than in his account of Grainger’s Shallow Brown. The huge opening piano tremolando set the tone for a reading of great intensity. Rose’s performance was operatic in scale and had tremendous impact. He was matched all the way by Gareth Hancock, whose piano playing was just as dramatic. At one point I scribbled on my notepad “Peter Grimes” for, in Matthew Rose’s hands – and Gareth Hancock’s - Grainger’s sea shanty arrangement had some of the raw power of Britten’s operatic masterpiece.

Britten himself was represented by three of his folksong arrangements. I’ve heard these arrangements described by some critics as too clever and/or a bit precious; indeed I’ve sometimes thought this myself. This was not the case on this occasion, however. At the start of the group Matthew Rose related a telling little story of an occasion when he’d sung The Foggy, Foggy Dew in a masterclass with the distinguished bass-baritone, John Shirley-Quirk. As Rose himself put it, he “hammed up” the setting, seeing it, as many do, as a “naughty” song. But Shirley-Quirk told him that the Foggy, Foggy Dew was, in fact, an old term for the Black Death. Clearly this changed Rose’s conception of the song and of Britten’s arrangement for he delivered a serious, “straight” performance of it. I can’t readily recall hearing it treated in this way before but I found it wholly convincing. Out of interest, as soon as I got home I dug out Bryn Terfel’s recording of the piece, on his album “Silent Noon” (DG 00289 474 2192). Sure enough, there were all the nudges and knowing winks, with everything heavily underlined as, unfortunately, this fine singer sometimes has a tendency to do. For myself I much prefer Matthew Rose’s more sober approach and I shall never regard this arrangement in the same way again. I enjoyed his other Britten performances too, especially Salley Gardens, in which one could admire his fine legato and sense of line as well as the ease with which he sang in the upper register of his voice.

The programme had opened with Vaughan Williams’s Songs of Travel. This collection of nine songs dates from 1904, towards the end of what Meurig Bowen felicitously describes as RVW’s “slow-burning apprenticeship.” A few days ago I heard Matthew Rose interviewed on BBC Radio 3’s In Tune programme. It seems that he has only recently taken these songs into his repertoire and I think we benefited from this in that his performance was fresh and vital.

Thus the first song, ‘The Vagabond’, was bold and firm. It sounded like a purposeful start to a journey. Here, right at the start of the recital, Rose showed many of his vocal credentials, singing with full, round tone and exhibiting a wide dynamic range. I admired also his clear diction, which was to be another consistent feature of the recital. After the appropriately forthright style of the first song I appreciated the more lyrical approach that both performers brought to ‘Let beauty awake’ – Gareth Hancock’s fluent playing was a conspicuous feature here – and Matthew Rose’s delightful golden tone in ‘Youth and love’. ‘Wither must I wander’ offered him another opportunity to show the tonal richness of his voice. In this song I thought he was conspicuously successful in mixing ardour and romantic lyricism. I’d heard him sing ‘Bright is the ring of words’ on the aforementioned radio broadcast. His performance was impressive then and it was just as good on this occasion. The final song, ‘I have trod the upward and the downward slope’ brings the whole collection together with its thematic references to the first and the penultimate songs. Rose and Hancock brought it off extremely well from the strong opening to the warm emotion of the last line of the text followed by a piano postlude, which was very sensitively played.

I enjoyed this performance very much. Perhaps there were occasions when Matthew Rose was just a bit too dramatic in his delivery. However, there could be no doubting his commitment to these songs in what was a manly and often ardent reading. And if the occasional phrase was a touch too emphatic I’d far rather have that than a bland, careful reading. After all, these are songs by a composer who was starting to flex his musical muscles and well on the way to finding his authentic voice. Also, it’s worth remembering that the poems themselves were only a little more than a decade old when RVW set them so the impact of fresh, expressive words on the composer is an important factor. I felt that Matthew Rose and Gareth Hancock gave an exciting and convincing performance.

At the other end of the recital we heard George Butterworth’s collection of six Housman settings, A Shropshire Lad. This was another very successful performance. Butterworth was about twenty-six years old when he composed these songs and as I listened, it struck me that a young singer such as Matthew Rose is especially well qualified to give voice to the music of this composer, whose life was cut tragically short in the carnage of World War I. Certainly I thought he conveyed well the mixture of wistfulness and passion in ‘Loveliest of trees.’ He was also successful in articulating the two contrasting voices that Housman and Butterworth employ in that deceptively “simple” little song, ‘When I was one-and-twenty.’ There’s a deceptive air to ‘The lads in their hundreds’ as well. On the surface Butterworth’s setting sounds like a lilting, easy going folk ballad but one is quickly aware that darker forces lurk beneath the surface of Housman’s verses and of Butterworth’s music. Rose did this song very well, staring off wistfully but building to the poignancy of the last line: “The lads that will die in their glory and never grow old”. Of course, Housman was not speaking specifically of young men dying in war and Butterworth set the text long before the horrors of war were visited on him and his generation. But the fact that within a few years Butterworth himself would be one of those many lads who “[died] in their glory and never grow old” lends this song a particular sense of futility and waste.

That is carried over into the final song, ‘Is my team ploughing?’ This is a dialogue between the dead young innocent and the more manly, more knowing survivor. I thought Rose brought off the contrast between these two characters very well indeed. Moreover, he did so in such a way as to distil a very genuine atmosphere in the hall by the time he and Hancock reached what was, as it should be, a moving conclusion to the song.

This was an enjoyable and, indeed, exciting recital. Matthew Rose is the fortunate possessor of a very fine bass voice. He appears also to be a thoroughly musical and thoughtful singer and though there was a good deal of passion in his performances one felt always that the readings had been carefully considered.  A crucial element in the success of the recital was the fine pianism of Gareth Hancock. There was a very definite and obvious rapport between these musicians. One can only admire the energy and enthusiasm of Gareth Hancock who, after playing this demanding programme, was off to conduct, one hour later, a rehearsal of Orff’s Carmina Burana followed by an evening performance of the work!

Before the start of the recital I overheard a member of the audience expressing some dissatisfaction that the programme was only about an hour in length. I hope that by the end of this excellent recital that gentleman felt, as I certainly did, that this was one of those occasions when quality was much more important than quantity. I look forward keenly to further opportunities to hear this fine young British singer who, surely, has an important career ahead of him.

John Quinn   

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