After a week of illness, heading out into the Sunday afternoon cold and rain was not something I was overjoyed to undertake. But in the event this short Wigmore Hall recital by three young singers and their fellow student pianists was thoroughly cheering, sending me back into the mizzle with a spring in my step. Both in their repertoire choices and their delivery of those choices there was so much to like and I am glad to have been there.
The Song Circle of the Royal Academy of Music pairs up auditioned singers and pianists and offers them a number of performing opportunities through their year – of which performing at the Wigmore Hall must be one of the highlights. They were cheered to the echo by a notably young audience (it is rare that my presence raises the average age there) taking advantage of the Hall’s £5 tickets for Under 35s. How I wish they had had that offer in place when I was young enough to take advantage.
Within seconds of the first singer starting I knew we were in for something special. Bass Daniel Venning (pictured below by Julian Guidera), with Alison Ma, performed Brahms’s Four Serious Songs, dating from the year before the composer’s death, and prompted by the death of his close friend Clara Schumann. Not perhaps the most obvious choice for a young singer, but Venning’s rich and coloured voice was well suited to the songs, and there was no hint of callowness in his interpretation. And after the extraordinary rounded low notes of the opening bars of the first song, he gave full vent to his upper register in the second, followed by some wonderful cantabile in the gorgeous melody of number three. Alison Ma at the keyboard was implacable, even stern in places, but always responsive. Venning’s magnificent singing was the highlight of the concert.
I had been attracted to the concert by the chance to hear Samuel Barber’s Hermit Songs, long a favourite cycle, but not one I had heard live before. It is no criticism of soprano Erin O’Rourke to say that I generally prefer a male voice in these songs, and she found a delightful range in the songs, English translations of medieval marginalia written by bored or distracted monks that really won me over. In particular her sultry suggestiveness in “Promiscuity”, the beery cheer of “The Heavenly Banquet” and – my favourite – the warmth and affection in “The Monk and his Cat” were extremely winning. The piano part – which Barber wrote for himself – is a cut above the usual Lieder accompaniment: by turns quirky, spiky and elusive, realised with imagination by Cherry Wong.
If the last singer, baritone Anton Kirchhoff, has the least finished voice, he made up for that with stagecraft and strongly characterised delivery of four songs from Mahler’s Das Knaben Wunderhorn. Tammas Slatter was perhaps the pick of the pianists, witty in “Das irdische Leben” and bravely very, very slow in the introduction to “Der Schwildwache Nachtlied”. Kirchoff revelled in the ridiculous melisma of “Wer hat dies Liedlein erdacht?” and generally played the role of an elder sibling relating tales that are on the surface childish, but have chilling surprises. His youthful earnestness and unmannered singing making the starvation, unrequited love and death all the more resonant.
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