Iain Burnside, Jouneying Boys, Royal College of Music Vocal Faculty, 8 February 2013

Britten Theatre, Royal College of Music

Arthur Rimbaud – Peter Kirk

Djami, Sanjit – Oscar Castellino
Gaubert, Milo – Nicholas Pritchard
Paul Verlaine – Matthew Buswell
Ernest Cabaner, Fletcher – Paul McKenzie
Beauchene, Trevor – Simon Gilkes
Florence, A, Caroline – Elizabeth Holmes
Mathilde Maute, Alex – Rowan Pierce
Mme Maute, Daisy, I – Rachel Bowden
E, Lavinia – Jennifer Carter
O, Imogen – Anna Anandarajah
U, Cheryl – Soraya Mafi
Benjamin Britten – Matthew Ward
W H Auden – Jerome Knox
Christopher Isherwood, Gus – Nicholas Morton
Lavinia – Jennifer Carter

Rimbaud (Peter Kirk), Djami (Oscar Castellino), Gaubert (Nicholas Pritchard)

Iain Burnside (director)

Giuseppe Belli (set designs)
Stephen Pelton (director)
Jools Osborns (costumes)
Paul Tucker (lighting)

 

Iain Burnside’s new play, apparently ‘conceived over a club sandwich’ taken with Nick Sears, Head of Vocal Studies at the Royal College of Music, is focused upon Britten’s Les Illuminations, though with a stronger emphasis on the poet Arthur Rimbaud than upon the composer himself. In fact, it darts around quite a bit, between a performance class for young singers, thus very much ‘at home’ in the RCM, snippets from Rimbaud’s life, and a few from Britten’s. Correspondence and history are mined without any sense of pedantry. Quite what it all adds up to remained a little unclear to me; the effect was in a sense determinedly, if un-theoretically, post-modern. But the business of artistic creation and re-creation is rarely linear, so the fragments of history and interpretative wisdom we hear in the singing class suffer little and arguably gain a form of truth from their interspersal with scenes from Rimbaud’s ultra-bohemian existence, scenes that take us to Marseilles, Harar in Abyssinnia, Aden, Mons, London, and Paris. Verlaine comes and foes, even having a short family scene to himself, with his long-suffering wife, her mother, and a non-speaking part for the young Achille(-Claude) Debussy at the piano. Rimbaud’s defiant, excessive non-metropolitan personality – his northern-ness much commented upon here – contrasts with the diffident young Britten we glimpse from time to time, Auden and Isherwood attempting to bring him out of himself. Much is made of poet’s and composer’s sexuality, both in their scenes and in the class discussion, a running joke provided by one female student whose comment upon every aspect of the work is that it shows how ‘queer’ the text is. As a banal coda, she persuades a fellow female student to join her for a Marks and Spencer ready meal after the class: knowing banality, perhaps, but I am not sure what it added. Nor was I really convinced that we needed a spoken chorus of vowels, A, E, I, O, and U during a few of Rimbaud’s scenes; we gained a commendable sense of his linguistic interests in any case. Nevertheless, at seventy-five minutes, the play was enjoyable and certainly did not overstay its welcome.

Students in the performance class

 

Performances were assured, both in terms of acting and singing. Indeed for a group of young singers who are not primarily actors their stage presence was most impressive. (The 'movement' seemed largely unnecessary, though.) Peter Kirk threw himself wholeheartedly into the role of Rimbaud; Matthew Ward, Jerome Knox, and Nicholas Morton, all proved convincing in their snatches of Britten, Auden, and Isherwood. And so it went on: the students offered strong characterisation as well as some fine singing. Indeed, I could not name a weak link in the cast. As well as Les Illuminations, extracts performed here in Britten’s own piano reduction, we also heard from four Verlaine settings, Debussy’s Chevaux de bois, Vaughan Williams’s The Sky above the Roof, Fauré’s Spleen and Une Sainte en son aureole, and Britten’s The Journeying Boy (Hardy), from which the play takes its name. The single performance sold out, but the play will be performed again later in the year at the Guildhall School of Music. A visit is heartily recommended, save to the readily-shockable Daily Mail brigade, for whom ‘language’ and tone might prove a little much.

Murray/Burnside - Schumann Lieder, 2 October 2010

Kings Place, Hall One

Gedichte der Königin Maria Stuart, op.135
Frauenliebe und –leben, op.42
O ihr Herren, op.37 no.3
Volksliedchen, op.51 no.2
Singet nicht in Trauertönen, op.98a/7

Ann Murray (mezzo-soprano)
Iain Burnside (piano)

This was one of the two concluding concerts in Kings Place’s Schumann 200 Festival, curated by Lucy Parham. I wish I had been able to attend the masterclass given by the same artists earlier in the day, for this song recital proved a winning contribution to the Schumann bicentenary.

If Schumann’s late Gedichte der Königin Maria Stuart (‘Poems of Mary Queen of Scots’) are finally receiving greater attention, that is some testimony to what such anniversary celebrations can achieve. Robin Holloway’s delectable transcription and encasement was premiered at the Proms last month; now it was time for the original. Ann Murray and Iain Burnside caught the dignity and starkness of this little, much misunderstood cycle with an intense yet understated musico-dramatic reading that at times looked forward to Wagner. The distilled necessity of what one heard was just right for these songs. More will so often be less here, but there was no attempt to overburden them with extraneous ‘emotion’. Diction and musical clarity were second to none.

Frauenliebe und –leben takes one back to a happier time, not just biographically but musically too. There were occasions when Murray could not disguise the loss of bloom in her voice, likewise odd intonational slips, but these counted for little when set against her moving response to verse and music. Schumann’s multifarious responses to the possibilities of life and love were treated in exemplary fashion, from youthful impetuosity to the marital devotion of Du Ring an meinem Finger. Burnside ensured that the cyclical quality of Schumann’s writing was very much to the fore. Detailed musical responses throughout, clarity of part-writing especially notable, were knowingly encased by the prologue and the concluding return of its material. Nun hast du mir den ersten Schmerz getan (‘Now you have caused me pain for the first time’) signalled both withdrawal and return, the truest poignancy, as so often with Schumann, in the piano. Simplicity that was never simplistic characterised the delightful Rückert settings, Volksliedchen and O ihr Herren, whilst a remembrance of things past, of youthful expectation, was not only to be heard but also felt in Singet nicht in Trauertönen.

Ronan Collett, Iain Burnside - 26 February 2009

Hall One, Kings Place

Schubert – Frühlingssehnsucht
Schubert – Geheimes
Schubert – An Schwager Kronos
Schubert – An die Entfernte
Schubert – An Emma
Schubert – Die Sternennächte
Schubert – Gruppe aus dem Tartarus
Schubert – Wanderers Nachtlied I
Beethoven – An die ferne Geliebte, op.98
Butterworth – Six Songs from ‘A Shropshire Lad’
Schumann – Freisinn
Schumann – Der Soldat
Schumann – Die Lotosblume
Schumann – Venetianische Lieder I and II
Schumann – Was will die einsame Träne
Schumann – Zum Schluss

Ronan Collett (baritone)
Iain Burnside (piano)

This should have been a recital of Beethoven songs, many of them rare indeed, by John Mark Ainsley and Iain Burnside, part of Kings Place’s ‘Beethoven Unwrapped’ series. ’Flu, however, intervened, leaving Ronan Collett to step in at twenty-four hours’ notice. It would, of course, have been entirely unreasonable to expect anyone to be able to replicate such a programme, but it is a pity that this overlooked aspect of Beethoven’s output will now however to await another occasion. The audience should have been grateful to Collett for saving the day, and it was, yet it becomes difficult to assess such a performance. On the one hand, it seems unfair to judge it as if this were something on which the musicians had been working for some time; on the other, it would be patronising not to apply critical standards. Perhaps the best thing is to report as usual but to bear in mind the circumstances.

The Schubert group opened with a song from Schubert’s final ‘cycle’, Schwanengesang. Collett’s voice imparted to Frühlingssehnsucht an apt sense of excitement and expectation. The head voice provided a touching contrast, even if, on ‘hinab?’, the tuning was a little awry; this was rectified on the crucial ‘Warum?’ and ‘und du’ of the following stanzas. A slight sauciness was applied to the Goethe setting, Geheimes. Both Collett and Burnside, playing with admirable clarity, conveyed due urgency in the portrayal of time as coachman in An Schwager Kronos, another Goethe song. There clearly was no time to lose and Collett reached dynamic levels not previously heard. Sometimes during this group, as in An Emma, the notes were not always perfectly centred, but that song inspired a mood of forlorn stillness from both artists. A richer tone was permitted for Gruppe aus dem Tartarus. Menace from voice and piano conveyed an appropriately hellish menace, followed by tender recovery in the first Wanderers Nachtlied.

An die ferne Geliebte was all that remained of Beethoven. The youthfulness of the poems – Alois Jeitteles was a twenty-year old medical student – struck a chord with Collett. Whereas sometimes in the Schubert settings, I had the impression that, in a few years’ time, the voice would sound more settled, here this was less of an issue. Perhaps nerves had settled too. Collett drew the listener in, commencing a real narrative with the opening of Auf dem Hügel sitz ich spähend. Burnside showed himself keen to the developmental nature of his part; a story is to unfold. Indeed, there were nice touches in the piano part throughout, not least in conveying that obstinate persistence we know so well from the sonatas. Both artists were alert to quicksilver changes of mood. Moreover, that nobility which is so very much Beethoven’s was apparent in both parts, as was a reminder that we are not always so very far from Schubert. The combination of grace and unsettling undercurrents played their parts here. With the return of the opening material, there was a sense not only of return, but also of what had changed. Hope there remained for reunion with the narrator’s distant beloved. Collett, it may be noted, is no stranger to this cycle, having performed it with Mitsuko Uchida, no less, at the Berlin Philharmonie, as part of her residency there.

Collett’s diction had been impeccable throughout, and would continue to be so. Nevertheless, it seemed with the Butterworth songs, that there was a more instantly communicative quality when he sang in English. There were occasional intonational slips but the tone was also richer. Wistfulness was apparent, though this was not overdone; there was vigour too, as in Think, no more lad. The head voice was put to good use in the opening of Is my team ploughing? This contrasted with a full tone in the following lines, the contrast setting up a continuing alternation: rather like a dialogue between past and present, or dead and alive. Burnside proved secure and imaginative as an accompanist throughout.

The Schumann songs also had that quality of more unmediated communication, so perhaps it was not so much a matter of the language, after all. Burnside’s rhythmic security provided a sure foundation for the vocal line, especially in the first of the Venetianische Lieder, where the rhythm is so crucial to capturing the sense of a gondolier’s song. Both artists carefully differentiated this from the second such song, in which a brighter tone was employed. In Der Soldat, a setting of Hans Christian Andersen, we heard pain and anger, although there was a recurrence of the occasional wavering in tuning. In Die Lotosblume and Was will die einsame Träne, the two Heine settings, I sometimes missed that ironic bite that a more mature voice might impart, but the beauty of Heine’s verse shone through nonetheless. With Zum Schluss, the performance did what the title suggested; there was a proper sense of conclusion, rather as in the similarly titled epilogue to the piano Arabesque. A quiet dignity pervaded this final song. For the encore, we remained with Schumann and Rückert. Du meine Seele received just the right degree of youthful tenderness and impetuosity. This song really played to Collett’s strengths.