Songs by Schumann, Britten, Copland, Dove and others, performed by Nicky Spence tenor; Clare Presland mezzo-soprano; Andrew Matthews-Owen piano; Robert Rinder presenter
This was an interesting programme, centred around songs from Schumann’s song cycle Frauenbliebe und Leben. Nicky Spence I know as an ENO Siegmund and a fine tenor in several of the Janacek operas heard in London recently. Clare Presland I thought I hadn’t heard/of before but in fact I had – she was the fine singer performing Pia in the premiere of Turnage’s Festen at ROHCG a few months ago.
This concert was a concept that looked great on paper but which didn’t quite work as well as it could have done, in practice. The idea was to balance Schumann’s Frauenliebe und leben, with its cyclical view of how human relationships work, against songs on the same themes by LGBTQ+ composers – think Britten, Copland, Poulenc, Stephen Hough and others. That’s good, and it did introduce me to a very fine young Welsh composer called Nathan James Dearden, whose songs are quite outstanding. I was also very moved by Jonathan Dove’s AIDS song, Soon. Nicky Spence is a well known presence on UK stages, and his voice is very much an operatic one – about three times the volume of Appl’s. But he can fine it down to a bare whisper, and his voice is capable of great beauty. In what I felt was the finest song of the whole programme, Britten’s Since she whom I loved from the Holy Sonnets of John Donne, his singing was quite outstanding, with a comparable intensity and loveliness to Appl’s.
Problems for me were as follows…..
Though I am very familiar with the songs – Janet Baker as a teenage purchase again – the texts of Frauenliebe und leben never fail to grate. They’re so cloying, so much of their time and a mid 19th century middle class view of how women are supposed to be that they are an embarrassment nearly 200 years later. Nicky Spence and Clare Presland attempted to deal with this by a partial staging around a coffee table. This was quite funny sometimes – Nicky S is a natural comedian and his reactions at times counteracted successfully the cloying sentimentality of the Schumann songs. But the range of songs emotionally was so wide that the staging idea didn’t always work or wasn’t always used.
This was a late night recital, starting at 10pm and billed to last ‘approx’ an hour. It actually lasted 75 mins, which is a bit much when people have last trains to catch. There should have been several fewer songs. One factor which extended the evening was the use of a presenter to read poems and letters. Though he did this very well, and it did allow the LGBTQ+ aspects to be more pointed – eg the famous late letter from Pears to Britten expressing his love – on the whole we could have done without these readings.
Finally, and it pains me to say this, while Nicky Spence has a powerful voice (singing Siegmund is not for the faint-hearted ), which is also capable of refinement and subtlety, Clare Presland’s voice on this occasion had a quite distractingly wide vibrato, which also seemed to lead to less pointing and variety of phrasing than was ideal. Maybe others heard her differently – I hope so. Let me stress that hers was a perfectly competent rendering of the Schumann songs, but just not on the level of Appl or Spence
I pushed and shoved my way on to a ‘severely delayed’ Victoria line train, at Oxford Circus, afterwards feeling I had had a very worthwhile evening
John's musical journey 