For a soprano first seen standing in the shower at the start of Glyndebourne’s new production of Der Rosenkavalier in Sussex last year, Kate Royal attracted a surprisingly small and elderly audience to her New Town Concert at the Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh, last night.
Admittedly the weather was wintry, but during the Edinburgh Festival she would have packed the place for a programme so skilfully constructed and so exquisitely sung.
True, her choice of music may have seemed somewhat specialised, even with Mahler’s five Ruckert settings as a heart-rending centrepiece. These were beautifully delivered, at the risk of making the rest of the programme, similarly chosen as an expression of aloneness, seem merely doleful. But it was never as dull as that, even if Samuel Barber’s ten Hermit Songs, in the second half, could have been considered caviar to the general.
Composed in the 1950s for the famous American soprano Leontyne Price, they did perhaps depend too much on the brightness of their piano accompaniments to make their effect. They were certainly vividly brought to life by Roger Vignoles, but Royal used ample artifice to rejuvenate each song, even if her articulation was not always as clear as it could have been.
It was Schumann’s haunting Hermit Song, standing alone at the end of the evening, which brought things back to the raptness of the Mahler. Once a Fischer-Dieskau favourite, it regained all the slow beauty of expression he used to give it, deftly counterbalanced by the lighter Schumann songs, and the lovely Clara Schumann ones, heard earlier in the recital.
Not that Schumann’s Bachian song about a pious girl could be called particularly light. But its romanticised baroquerie was touchingly caught, the Schumann equivalent of some of the Bachian strains to be heard in the first scene of Wagner’s Meistersinger.
Though Kate Royal’s voice is not enormous - as Roger Vignoles’s accompaniment sometimes underlined - she floats it to admiration. This was a recital to remember, enhanced by the limiting of applause to the end of each half.
1 December 2015
Admittedly the weather was wintry, but during the Edinburgh Festival she would have packed the place for a programme so skilfully constructed and so exquisitely sung.
True, her choice of music may have seemed somewhat specialised, even with Mahler’s five Ruckert settings as a heart-rending centrepiece. These were beautifully delivered, at the risk of making the rest of the programme, similarly chosen as an expression of aloneness, seem merely doleful. But it was never as dull as that, even if Samuel Barber’s ten Hermit Songs, in the second half, could have been considered caviar to the general.
Composed in the 1950s for the famous American soprano Leontyne Price, they did perhaps depend too much on the brightness of their piano accompaniments to make their effect. They were certainly vividly brought to life by Roger Vignoles, but Royal used ample artifice to rejuvenate each song, even if her articulation was not always as clear as it could have been.
It was Schumann’s haunting Hermit Song, standing alone at the end of the evening, which brought things back to the raptness of the Mahler. Once a Fischer-Dieskau favourite, it regained all the slow beauty of expression he used to give it, deftly counterbalanced by the lighter Schumann songs, and the lovely Clara Schumann ones, heard earlier in the recital.
Not that Schumann’s Bachian song about a pious girl could be called particularly light. But its romanticised baroquerie was touchingly caught, the Schumann equivalent of some of the Bachian strains to be heard in the first scene of Wagner’s Meistersinger.
Though Kate Royal’s voice is not enormous - as Roger Vignoles’s accompaniment sometimes underlined - she floats it to admiration. This was a recital to remember, enhanced by the limiting of applause to the end of each half.
1 December 2015
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