Robin Tritschler and Friends at John Field Room, National Concert Hall, on 14 June 2015
After its successful introduction last year, the KBC Great Music in Irish Houses Festival repeated the ‘Dublin Musical Saunter’ – a mini-festival held on the Festival’s last day – this time including as a theme the 150th Anniversary of W.B. Yeats. This recital, the second of four concerts held today, brings tenor Robin Tritschler together with the Vanburgh Quartet, flautist William Dowdall, oboist Matthew Manning and pianist Hugh Tinney, in an eclectic, Yeats-inspired programme. As well as being a fine tenor (easily one of the best Ireland has produced in recent years), Tritschler is also keenly adept at the art of recital-programming, and this set is certainly no exception. As Tritschler points out in his excellent programme notes, the poetry featured in the songs is mostly from Yeats’ 1899 collection The Wind Among the Reeds, with its account of doomed love, and this gives the sequence a strong coherence.
The opening song, Dunhill’s ‘The Cloths of Heaven’ for tenor and string quartet, sets the scene beautifully. Tritschler sings with clarity and tender expressiveness; projecting the words with understanding, he commands rapt attention from the audience. This short song serves as an epigraph to the concert, as Tritschler now leaves the stage to be replaced by Matthew Manning for the Bax Quintet. Chosen both for Bax’s infatuation for Ireland (and Yeats’ writings) and also as a sympathetic prelude to the work coming after, the impressionistic flavour of Bax’s piece is brought across vividly. The jig-like finale imagines the string players as a kind of country band, with sparkling playing from the quartet’s first violinist, Gregory Ellis.
Tritschler now re-joins the ensemble along with William Dowdall for the work that stands at the heart of this recital, Peter Warlock’s song cycle The Curlew. This fascinating work receives an arresting performance from Tritschler and the ensemble, the singer coolly expressive and tellingly direct by turns. Together, the musicians bring forward Warlock’s dark, desperate reading of Yeats’ poetry with sensitive clarity. The soft ending, with its fade into pure silence, is beautifully done.
The second half opens more like a conventional recital, with the singer now accompanied by pianist Hugh Tinney. The items from Rebecca Clarke’s two songs through to the four pieces by Rieti are performed without a break, conceived as a seamless sequence. This collection of – mostly American – songs brings a lightness of flavour, with Clarke’s unaffected style leading to Corigliano’s curious take on ‘The Salley Gardens’, the traditional tune embroidered with flute interpolations, atmospherically played by Dowdall off-stage. The simple directness of Rorem’s songs carries the mood forward into Vittorio Rieti’s delightfully witty exercises, Tinney’s elegant pianism providing a solid foil to Tritschler’s engaging singing.
All but one of the performers re-unite on stage for the final item, Lowell Liebermann’s six-song cycle A Poet to His Beloved. Liebermann’s distanced expressionism brings a wistful quality to Yeats’ words, matched by fine playing and singing. Tritschler distinguishes himself throughout this recital with singing of expressive immediacy and intelligence, always directly engaged with the audience. Lieberman’s last song uses the same text as that of the opening song – ‘The Cloths of Heaven’ – as if closing a circle. Its final phrase drifts to nothing, like a cloud passing away. After the silence, the applause is full, and well-deserved.
Programme:
Thomas Dunhill: ‘The Cloths of Heaven’, Op. 30/3 (from The Wind Among the Reeds); arr. for tenor and string quartet by Chris Hazell
Arnold Bax: Oboe Quintet (1922)
Peter Warlock: The Curlew for tenor, string quartet, cor anglais and flute (1922)
Rebecca Clarke: ‘Shy One’ (1912); ‘The Dream’ (1926)
John Corigliano: ‘Down by the Salley Gardens’ (1988)
Ned Rorem: Two Yeats Songs [‘To a Young Girl’; ‘O Do Not Love Too Long’] (1951)
Vittorio Rieti: Two Songs between Two Waltzes (1957)
Lowell Liebermann: A Poet to His Beloved, Op. 40, for tenor, string quartet, flute and piano (1993)
Robin Tritschler (tenor); Hugh Tinney (piano); William Dowdall (flute); Matthew Manning (oboe/cor anglais); the Vanbrugh Quartet (Gregory Ellis and Keith Pascoe (violin), Simon Aspell (viola), and Christopher Marwood (cello))