Youth, Love and Nature

Youth, Love and Nature in famous Song Cycles was a Festival of Young Voices concert given in association with the Royal Academy of Music and its Song Circle, Programme VII of the Rudolf Kempe Society’s 2016 Songs of Apollo season. Two young singers and two pianists from the Academy performed four song cycles in three languages – by Ralph Vaughan Williams, Ernest Chausson, Gustav Mahler and Gerald Finzi – introduced by Richard Stokes, Professor of Lied at the Royal Academy of Music. It was a matinee on Sunday 27 November 2016 at 3.00 pm at the Kempe Studio at The Muses, 58 Waterside, Stratford-upon-Avon, given in aid of the Rudolf Kempe Society International Young Artists Platform.

Performers

• Carolyn Holt – mezzo-soprano. An Irish mezzo who took a first-class degree in vocal performance at the Royal Irish Academy of Music before the MA in Vocal Performance (Preparatory Opera) at the Royal Academy of Music, as Cork Scholar. She had sung at the Royal Festival Hall and Wigmore Hall, under Sir Mark Elder with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, in roles from Prince Orlofsky to the Zweite Dame, and had won a string of Irish prizes including the Irish Heritage Bursary and the Feis Ceoil Mahler Prize.
• Richard Walshe – baritone. After an MA with distinction at the Royal Academy of Music he was starting the Advanced Diploma with Royal Academy Opera. He made his Opera Holland Park debut as Colline in La Bohème in 2016, sang Figaro, Melisso and Amantio for Royal Academy Opera, was a soloist in the Kohn Foundation Bach Cantata series, and had just won the Richard Lewis/Jean Shanks Award 2016.
• Zuzanna Basinska – piano. A Polish pianist studying piano accompaniment with Michael Dussek and James Baillieu at the Royal Academy of Music, a prize-winner in national and international piano and chamber music competitions in Poland, Germany, France and Lithuania, who had made her concerto debut at 17.
• Cameron Richardson-Eames – piano. Born in Grimsby in 1992, he studied at Trinity College, Cambridge (first-class honours, 2014, and a choral scholar in its choir) and then at the Royal Academy of Music with Michael Dussek and Tessa Nicholson. Devoted mainly to accompaniment and chamber music, he was a Park Lane Group Young Artist and had played for master classes with singers such as Joan Rodgers, Sarah Connolly and Roderick Williams.
• Richard Stokes – introduction. Professor of Lied at the Royal Academy of Music.

Programme

Part I

• Ralph Vaughan Williams – Songs of Travel (Robert Louis Stevenson) – Richard Walshe, Cameron Richardson-Eames
  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
• Ernest Chausson – Poème de l’Amour et de la Mer, Op. 19 (Maurice Bouchor) – printed in the booklet as Richard Walshe, Cameron Richardson-Eames
  1. La Fleur des Eaux
     • Interlude
  2. La Mort de l’Amour

Part II

• Gustav Mahler – Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (Songs of a Wayfarer, words by the composer) – Carolyn Holt, Zuzanna Basinska
  1. Wenn mein Schatz Hochzeit macht
  2. Ging heut’ Morgen übers Feld
  3. Ich hab’ ein glühend Messer
  4. Die zwei blauen Augen
• Gerald Finzi – Let Us Garlands Bring, five Shakespeare settings – Richard Walshe, Cameron Richardson-Eames
  1. Come away, come away, death (Twelfth Night, Act II, scene 4)
  2. Who is Sylvia? (The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Act IV, scene 2)
  3. Fear no more the heat o’ the sun (Cymbeline, Act IV, scene 2)
  4. O mistress mine (Twelfth Night, Act II, scene 3)
  5. It was a lover and his lass (As You Like It, Act V, scene 3)

About the programme

Dame Judi Dench’s welcome in the booklet described four cycles by great song-writers in three languages and from very different cultures, sharing the themes of love, youth, happiness, loss and sorrow – “and the all-healing power of Nature”.

The booklet’s notes set Vaughan Williams’s Songs of Travel (1901–04), his first major song cycle, alongside the great German “wayfarer” cycles: Stevenson’s traveller has neither the naivety of Schubert’s miller nor the self-destructive despair of the heroes of Winterreise and Mahler’s Songs of a Wayfarer – but all share a dark atmosphere and a close bond with Nature. Chausson’s Poème de l’Amour et de la Mer, written between 1882 and 1892 to poems by his friend Maurice Bouchor and dedicated to Henri Duparc, is in two parts joined by an interlude, its ending borrowing from his song Le Temps des Lilas; at the 1893 Brussels premiere Chausson himself played the piano.

Mahler wrote the Songs of a Wayfarer to his own words in the early 1880s (the booklet says around 1880–85), after an unhappy love for the soprano Johanna Richter in Kassel, and later orchestrated them; the notes point out that the cycle, for medium voice, suits women as well as men. Finzi worked on Let Us Garlands Bring from 1938 to 1940; it was first heard in 1942 at the National Gallery wartime lunchtime concerts on Vaughan Williams’s 70th birthday and dedicated to him. Both composers, the notes remind us, were drawn to the Gloucestershire countryside. The booklet also printed sayings of Robert Louis Stevenson, and closed with lines from Hazell Hills’s poem Roundelay for Rudolf Kempe.

Credits

• Introduction: Richard Stokes
• Welcome: Dame Judi Dench, Patron of the Rudolf Kempe Society
• Publicity, printing and archive recordings: Max Ross
• In association with the Royal Academy of Music and its Song Circle