It was one of those stuffy June evenings and the Wensleydale Memorial
Hall was nearly full for the last concert of the season of the Washtree
Musical Society. Close on seventy people pretending to feel comfortable
on hard wooden chairs that creaked as you moved and squeaked against
the stone-tiled floor and each chair seemed to have one leg shorter
than the others. Close on seventy people all come to hear "Die
schöne Müllerin", quite a thing for a little place miles
from anywhere like Washtree. The singer was a local chap, Tom Cobbleigh,
who’d had some singing lessons in his younger days from a foreign
maestro and then gone into the drapery business but had always been
ready to do his bit singing around the place, Messiahs and Elijahs all
over the county, the Gilbert and Sullivan Club, and you should hear
him sing "Drake’s Drum" with the brass band! But he’d
always said he’d like to get up one of the Schubert cycles while
he still had the voice to do it, so here he was and the locals supported
him loyally. Old Joe Spratt in the corner never missed a local event
and thought he enjoyed it though he was a bit hard of hearing these
days, and Miss Honeygum, who’d been doing the Church flowers for
fifty years (and they looked like it) thought it had some very pretty
tunes, especially near the beginning. Not many of the young people turned
up, but that was only to be expected.
At the piano was Mrs. Gertrude Hall, the previous Vicar’s wife
who, as a young girl, had taken some lessons in London with the great
Mr. Craxton and of whom things had been expected before she settled
down to being a Vicar’s wife. But she still kept her hand in and
obliged when a local do called, and it was a crying shame that the new
Vicar had brought guitars and things into the Church and only asked
her to play the organ at Christmas.
Of course, if you wanted to be carpingly critical you could find plenty
to say. Tom’s voice was getting a bit croaky up the top and hadn’t
much strength at the bottom and his intonation on the lower notes was,
well, not always a hundred per cent. When the going got rough, like
in "Der Jäger", it was something if he got most of the
words out, never mind the notes, his As (the ones that had to rhyme
with the baa of baa-lamb) were a bit odd, perhaps his adenoids needed
looking at (there were a lot of these in "Pause"), when he
tried to be expressive it came out rather a caricature ("Der Neugierge"
was an example of this). And as for Mrs. Hall, she put up a valiant
show, a touch heavy-handed in places, none too clear in the introduction
to "Ungeduld" but not bad, not bad at all.
But why be so carpingly critical in Washtree? If you believe in live
music, and I hope we all do, what are all these fine points before the
central fact that Schubert’s "Die schöne Müllerin"
got a performance in a small town where the great names never come,
and all told the public took away a reasonable idea of what it’s
about, Schubert’s music cast its spell. But would you put Tom Cobbleigh
and Hall’s performance on a CD? Oh, no, my dear, even Miss Honeygum
could see that, records are made by professional people, not by the
local chaps. Records are made by people like Josef Baert and Roumiana
Stantcheva. Now they’re professionals all right. Just look what
it says about them on the miserable little booklet (minuscule notes
on music and performers in four languages, song texts in German only).
He studied in Vienna and Paris, she studied in Sofia and they met at
the Brussels Royal Conservatory. They’ve been doing lieder together
since 1968, he’s sung in a whole string of operas (Papageno, Guglielmo,
Almaviva, Don Giovanni, you name it …). They’ve been on TV,
they’ve made four lieder records. They’re both professors.
Now you can’t get much more professional than that. I mean to say,
just listen to the start of "Der Jäger", "Pause"
and "Ungeduld" (examples 1-3, tracks 14, 12, 7, each from
the beginning) and compare them with what I had to say about poor Tom
Cobbleigh and Hall and you can hear that I wasn’t really describing
Baert and Stantcheva. How could you imagine such a thing?
Now, a word of advice to Pavane. If you must make CDs like this, flog
them in the supermarkets and the bazaars but don’t send them to
critics who might show them up for what they are. And a word of advice
to Baert and Stancheva. If you must make records, record stuff that’s
never been done before, and even if you’re not perfect we might
bless you even so.
Christopher Howell
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Josef Baert (baritone),
Roumiana Stantcheva (pianoforte)
