And My Soul Spread Wide Its Wings

And My Soul Spread Wide Its Wings – A Lover’s Travels in Song Cycles by Vaughan Williams, Finzi and Schumann was the Rudolf Kempe Birthday Concert of 2015, given on Kempe’s birthday itself, Sunday 14 June 2015, at 5.00 pm at the Kempe Studio at The Muses, 58 Waterside, Stratford-upon-Avon. Part of the Society’s Festival of Young Voices, it is numbered Programme V of the 2015 Songs of Apollo season in the printed programme (Programme IV on the poster). It marked the long-awaited return of the bass-baritone Stephan Loges – a member of the Society’s 1998 International Young Artists Platform – with his wife, the pianist Natasha Loges, and was given in aid of the Rudolf Kempe Society International Young Artists Platform.

Performers

• Stephan Loges – bass-baritone. Born in Dresden, Rudolf Kempe’s home city, he began at its Kreuzchor school, studied in Berlin and then at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama with Rudolf Piernay, where he later taught German song. An early winner of the Wigmore Hall International Song Competition, he had sung recitals at Wigmore Hall, Carnegie Hall, the Concertgebouw and the Vienna Konzerthaus, Bach with Sir John Eliot Gardiner and Paul McCreesh, the St Matthew Passion at his 2002 Proms début, and opera at La Monnaie, Covent Garden and Opera North.
• Natasha Loges – piano. A Guildhall School piano graduate with a doctorate from the Royal Academy of Music on Text and Context in Brahms’s Lieder, she was Head of Postgraduate Programmes at the Royal College of Music, a song accompanist heard on BBC Radio 3, and co-editor of Brahms in the Home and the Concert Hall (Cambridge University Press, 2014).

Programme

Part I – A Lover’s Travels

Ralph Vaughan Williams – Songs of Travel (Robert Louis Stevenson)

1. The Vagabond
2. Let Beauty Awake
3. The Roadside Fire
4. Youth and Love
5. In Dreams
6. The Infinite Shining Heavens
7. Whither Must I Wander
8. Bright Is the Ring of Words
9. I Have Trod the Upward and the Downward Slope

Gerald Finzi – Let Us Garlands Bring: five settings of Shakespeare

• Come away, come away, death (Twelfth Night, Act II Scene 4)
• Who is Sylvia? (The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Act IV Scene 2)
• Fear no more the heat o’ the sun (Cymbeline, Act IV Scene 2)
• O mistress mine (Twelfth Night, Act II Scene 3)
• It was a lover and his lass (As You Like It, Act V Scene 3)

Interval

Part II

Robert Schumann – Liederkreis, Op. 39 (Joseph von Eichendorff)

1. In der Fremde (In a Foreign Land)
2. Intermezzo
3. Waldesgespräch (A Forest Dialogue)
4. Die Stille (Silence)
5. Mondnacht (Moonlit Night)
6. Schöne Fremde (A Beautiful Foreign Land)
7. Auf einer Burg (In a Castle)
8. In der Fremde (In a Foreign Land)
9. Wehmut (Sadness)
10. Zwielicht (Twilight)
11. Im Walde (In the Forest)
12. Frühlingsnacht (Spring Night)

About the programme

The title is a line from Eichendorff’s Mondnacht – “Und meine Seele spannte / Weit ihre Flügel aus” – the fifth song of Schumann’s Liederkreis. Dame Judi Dench, the Society’s patron, welcomed a programme celebrating English as well as German song by some of the greatest composers and poets of the two languages.

The booklet’s notes described Vaughan Williams’s Songs of Travel (1901–04), his first major song cycle, as a quintessentially British “wayfarer cycle”: Stevenson’s world-weary but resolute traveller has neither the naivety of Schubert’s miller nor the destructive impulses of the heroes of Winterreise and Mahler’s Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, but shares their dark atmosphere and closeness to nature. Finzi worked on Let Us Garlands Bring from 1938 to 1940; first performed in 1942 at the National Gallery lunchtime concerts in the middle of the war, it was dedicated to Vaughan Williams on his seventieth birthday. Schumann composed the Eichendorff cycle in 1840, his “year of song” and of his marriage to Clara Wieck, to whom he dedicated it; Eichendorff’s guiding theme, the notes said, was that happiness lies in full absorption in the beauties and changing moods of nature. The Birthday Concert each year underlined the Society’s close connection with Kempe’s native Dresden.

Credits

• Programme devised by Cordula Kempe, with her translation of Eichendorff’s Wünschelrute