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SEEN
AND HEARD CONCERT REVIEW
'In sweet music is such art' - Vaughan Williams and
Friends:
Allan Clayton (tenor), Julius Drake (piano), Navarra
Quartet (Xander Van Vliet (violin), Marije Ploemacher
(violin), Simone van der Giessen (viola), Nathaniel
Boyd (cello), Wigmore Hall, London, 2.12.2008 (BBr)
Vaughan Williams:
Orpheus with his lute (1901)
Ivor Gurney:
On Wenlock Edge (1917)
Most Holy Night (1920 rev 1925)
By a Bierside (1916)
Vaughan Williams:
Linden Lea (1901)
Ivor Gurney:
Ludlow and Teme (1919)
David Matthews:
One Foot in Eden (2008) (London première)
Vaughan Williams:
On Wenlock Edge (1908/1909)
I have never been a fan of VW’s On Wenlock Edge,
finding it to be too light and obvious. Tonight I
realized what my problem with the music really was:
George Butterworth and Ivor Gurney. Butterworth wrote
his cycle A Shropshire Lad in 1912, before the
war which killed him, and he wrote it with, probably,
a belief in the old lie
Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.
Gurney’s Ludlow and Teme was written after the
same war and by a man who not only survived the
carnage but was irrevocably harmed by it. By the side
of these masterpieces VW simply takes us on a
pleasant travelogue through the countryside.
Tonight’s show – part of the VW and Friends
series devised by Julius Drake – would have been an
almost unbearable experience if it had started with
Butterworth’s cycle – probably the greatest song
cycle by an English composer – but what a show it
would have been!
The tragedy of Ivor Gurney was that he was wounded in
April 1917 and gassed the following September. He was
also bi–polar (not that that diagnosis existed at
that time) and in 1922 his family had him declared
insane and he spent the final 15 years of his life in
various hospitals : whilst staying at the City of
London Mental Hospital, at Dartford, in Kent, that he
was diagnosed as suffering from "delusional insanity
(systematized)”
That
he was probably the finest English song composer of
the first half of the 20th century adds
even more to the catastrophe which was his fate. The
three Gurney songs in the first half of the show were
perfect examples of his art: total restraint in the
utterance, a respect for the words and full of
emotion. The two very early VW songs sat uneasily
beside them. Then came Ludlow and Teme.
Whereas Butterworth treats the poetry as idyllic but
with a feeling of the great game to come, Gurney sets
the verse as a revulsion against what had happened to
“half the seed of Europe”. It’s a truly great piece
of work, forget restraint in these songs, here is raw
passion and almost unbearable suffering.
At the end we had VW’s pleasant Housman settings but
by then we’d lived the horror with Gurney and, for
me, they failed to communicate.
As a release from all this we had the London première
of three setting of Edwin Muir by David Matthews.
This set of three songs, running together as a
continuous whole, is one of the most distinguished
works I have heard from this composer. Especially
fine was the middle setting, Autumn in Prague,
which had a special calm to it. The layout was odd:
the first song began with a single pizzicato then the
piano accompanied alone, an interlude before and
after the setting of Autumn and also the
setting itself, were for the whole quintet and the
final setting, Sunset, was for string quartet
alone with the piano joining for the coda. Impressive
stuff indeed.
Allan Clayton is the possessor of a light lyrical
voice, nowhere the hint of the helden for him.
This is a true song voice and he was partnered
admirably by Julius Drake and the Navarro Quartet but
my complaint about the first concert in this series I
attended still stands. Why did Drake insist on having
the piano lid on the full stick when the half stick
would have been a better choice and saved Clayton
from being occasionally overwhelmed by the sound.
Despite my little quibble, these were fine
performances and were a joy to hear.
Bob Briggs
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