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New French Song on the South Bank How
often do you get twenty British premières in one concert in one
evening? Probably very rarely, if ever. Congratulations then to soprano
Alison Smart
and pianist Katharine Durran for devising such
a fascinating programme under the title New
French Song. For their Purcell Room recital on 13 July they
commissioned twenty British composers to set music to any French
literature of their choice from the past 200 years. The selected texts
covered a wide range of writers from the Romantics and Symbolists right
through to the postmodern era; one of the composers, Edward McGuire,
chose to set his own text to music. The result was a medley of songs on
the subjects of life, death, memory, youth, the Tour de France and even
a rather bizarre dinner menu! What
was very interesting about this concert was each composer's personal
response to the imagery and language within their chosen text and
whether they chose to pay homage to the French harmonic language and
textures of the past or to go a different route. Gabriel Jackson's
setting of A
la Mémoire de Claude Debussy by Jean Cocteau was the most overt in
its reference to Debussy's piano music and harmonic language of
once-forbidden parallel fourths and fifths. Edward Cowie nodded towards
Debussy and Messaien in his use of birdsong, while Tarik O'Regan and
John Casken were particularly interesting in their impressionistic
textures and colouring. Otherwise these song-settings were disparate in
their huge variety of compositional ideas and methods. The
most powerful song of the evening was Adam Gorb's setting of Charles
Baudelaire’s La
Cloche Fêlée; this terrifyingly intense, chilling poem was
musically portrayed by the particularly effective writing in the piano,
employing opposite extremes of pitch and with bass tones stopped inside
the instrument by the pianist to conjure up the death rattle of the
bells. Alison
Smart was in full control of her voice throughout the recital, pitching
the frequently challenging vocal lines with ease. Though hers is not a
huge voice and her diction was occasionally under projected, she
elicited a really impressive range of colours and contours, comfortably
handling the stylistic changes between songs. She was, without doubt,
helped by having a true painter as her partner at the keyboard. With a
remarkable sensitivity and wide palette of colours, Katharine Durran’s
playing was a musical lesson in Art history. Let’s hope that this duo
persuades other performers to jump on the bandwagon and further explore
what our composers today have to offer. MANUS
CAREY
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