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Richard Bratby

~ Classical music writer, critic and consultant

Richard Bratby

Tag Archives: Tardebigge

Review: Roderick Williams & Susie Allen

28 Wednesday Sep 2016

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Birmingham Post, Reviews, Roderick Williams, Tardebigge

Tardebigge 1

Tardebigge Steeple – photo by Annette Rubery.

The Birmingham Post isn’t always able to post online everything that I’ve written for its print edition, so – after a suitable time lag (you should really go out and buy the paper!) – I’ll be posting my recent reviews here. As per the print edition, they’re all fairly concise – just 250 words. This is of a performance at Tardebigge in Worcestershire on Sunday 28 August.


For thirteen years Jennie McGregor-Smith and her team of helpers have brought some of the world’s finest singers to the Georgian church at Tardebigge, and persuaded them to champion a repertoire that – even if it’s no longer quite as endangered as it was back in 2004 – we still can’t afford to take for granted. The singers have ranged from Nicky Spence to Susan Bickley; the songs have spanned centuries and continents, with a remarkable list of world premieres and commissions. The welcome has been warm, the setting idyllic and the audience devoted.

No more. This was Celebrating English Song’s final concert, and it said everything about this wonderful little series that it turned out to be such a joyous occasion. The performers, Roderick Williams and Susie Allen, had a lot to do with that: Williams’s baritone is just so sunny, so graceful and so effortlessly expressive. He floated the opening lines of Butterworth’s Loveliest of Trees over Allen’s eloquent, understated piano in a single, rapturous arc; bringing out the cycle’s latent drama not with grand gestures, but with endless subtle shadings of the voice.

That set the tone for a concert designed to celebrate as many English-language song composers as possible in a mere two hours. Cycles by Butterworth, Ireland and Ivor Gurney anchored the programme; Quilter, Moeran, Warlock, Vaughan Williams and Britten also featured, as did Ian Venables – who took a bow in person. There was a gentle emphasis on local poets – Housman, Masefield, and Shakespeare – but this was as gloriously rich and diverse an afternoon as we’ve ever spent at Tardebigge, and if Williams’s cheerful attempts to get the audience to sing along in Gurney’s rum-fuelled Captain Stratton’s Fancy didn’t quite pay off, maybe it’s because this has always been more of a tea and cake crowd.

Finzi’s It Was A Lover And His Lass ended the official programme on a note of bright-eyed optimism. But there was one song left to sing: Gurney’s Sleep, a special request from Jennie herself – whose devotion and achievement in giving us these thirteen magical summers fully merited the ovation she received from audience and performers alike.

Review: Benjamin Appl at Tardebigge

25 Monday Jul 2016

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Benjamin Appl, Birmingham Post, Finzi, Ivor Gurney, Reviews, Tardebigge

The Birmingham Post isn’t always able to post online everything that I’ve written for its print edition, so – after a suitable time lag (you should really go out and buy the paper!) – I’ll be posting my recent reviews here. As per the print edition, they’re all fairly concise – just 250 words. This is of a performance at  Tardebigge Church  on Sunday 26 June.


Tardebigge 1

Tardebigge Steeple photo by Annette Rubery.

I’m sure Birmingham Post readers will understand how the A38 and M42 conspired to make me miss the first half of the opening concert of this summer’s Celebrating English Song series at Tardebigge church, performed by pianist Simon Lepper and the extraordinary young Bavarian baritone Benjamin Appl. I can only regret that I’m unable to comment on a first half that included songs by Haydn, Finzi and Barber – except to say that the choice of composers alone shows what an open-minded definition of “English song” the organisers employ.

And that Appl’s interpretations would surely have been richly worth hearing. Appl’s a former protégé of Fischer-Dieskau, but he’s no unreflecting traditionalist. He’s recently toured a programme of Schubert, Grieg and Nico Muhly, and Muhly’s mini-cycle The Last Letter – a keenly-imagined setting of anonymous love letters from the First World War, rounded off with a verse by Schiller – showed Appl’s ability to switch mood and timbre in a blink; to colour words, and to yield to Lepper’s subtle, endlessly detailed piano part.

Then came a sequence of songs by Ivor Gurney interspersed with songs by Ian Venables on the subject of – or setting poems by – Gurney. It worked well; Venables’s plangent melodies elegantly setting off Gurney’s restless little tone-poems of longing and loss. Appl and Lepper painted them with rich colours and deep feeling: if there were very occasional slips of pronunciation, I’ve certainly heard far worse from Anglophone singers in Schubert. And what does that matter against the radiant surge of tone with which Lepper and Appl soared over the crest of Gurney’s In Flanders? This music, so intimately rooted in Severnside, has never felt more part of a shared European tradition. Supply your own political metaphor.

 

Finzi vs Bridge

29 Monday Jun 2015

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Armonico Consort, Birmingham Post, Finzi, Frank Bridge, Rachmaninoff, Reviews, Tardebigge

Tardebigge Steeple - photo by Annette Rubery.

Tardebigge Steeple – photo by Annette Rubery.

Two interesting reviews over the last few days: a beautiful Rachmaninoff Vespers (we’ll forgive then for spelling it “Rachmaninov” – grrr…) at St Mary’s Church, Warwick, and a song recital at Tardebigge church yesterday. It’s a fascinating place – a crumbling Georgian pile on a hill in the fields outside Bromsgrove, whose churchyard apparently contains the grave of the Queen of the Gypsies (we couldn’t find it). We were there for the annual Celebrating English Song series, and a setting like that naturally makes you think “English pastoral”. Sure enough, there was Finzi’s Dies Natalis at the top of the programme, beautifully performed but sounding a little threadbare without its full string orchestra.

But it went down well, and the Finzi Trust put up a good showing during the interval, complete with sales stall. Old Gerald clearly has a enthusiastic audience, and I’m gradually coming to see past his rather watery (IMHO) ideas and find something a bit knottier underneath: though the Clarinet Concerto and the Christmas cantata In Terra Pax are still the only two pieces of his that I’d actually go out of my way to hear. Maybe it’s the whole English cathedral choral thing; boy sopranos, modal harmonies, the aura of damp stone and dull Sunday teatimes that so many folk seem to find so magical, and which gives so much really rather feeble vocal music the status of cherished national treasure. I’ve never really been part of that world.

But the concert ended with a series of songs by Frank Bridge. No supporters’ club for him – the soprano Elizabeth Watts actually went out of her way to explain who he was. And yet – just as I, at least, expected – there it all was: freshness, clarity, craftsmanship, a depth of emotion combined with an almost classical grace, transparency and lightness-of-touch. In a word: inspiration – the real thing.

I’ve been finding all this in Frank Bridge for so many years: in his superb chamber music and his lovely, luminous orchestral scores. Why one neglected composer strikes a widely-felt chord and attracts a cult following, while another equally gifted (I’m being charitable to Finzi here) composer continues to need special pleading, I honestly don’t know. The suspicion rises – not for the first time – that my ears are simply wired differently from those of my musical fellow countrymen.

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