Ian Bostridge & Dame Sarah Connolly
Approximate running time: 73 minutes, no interval
Please note all timings are approximate and subject to change.
This performance is subject to government guidelines.
Chausson’s beautiful song cycle Poeme de l’amour et de lar mer is a revealing companion to Vaughan Williams’s quintessentially English pastoral idyll, On Wenlock Edge, as Harriet Smith explains.
In contrast to the text of the Poème de l’amour, there’s no doubting the quality of the poetry in Vaughan Williams’s On Wenlock Edge, which sets six poems from A E Housman’s A Shropshire Lad – a cycle which was to prove irresistible to British composers from George Butterworth to Lennox Berkeley. On Wenlock Edge was among the earliest musical responses, completed in 1909, a mere 13 years after the poems were published. They marked an important moment for the composer, being the first work to emerge after Vaughan Williams had spent a three-month stint in Paris, studying with Ravel. Although by now in his thirties, he was still struggling to find his authentic voice and Ravel paid him the rare compliment that among his pupils, he was the only one ‘not to write my music’.
Vaughan Williams’s initial idea was a cycle for voice and piano but how much more potent (und unorthodox) is the addition of a string quartet, greatly increasing the available colour palette. Housman’s subject matter is frequently based around love and loss, and the commemoration of young soldiers guilelessly going off to die in foreign fields was to prove horribly prescient.
In On Wenlock Edge the composer delights in the many opportunities for word-painting, from the gale depicted in the woods in the eponymous opening song, which mirrors the stormy emotions of both the poet himself and the protagonist, a Roman centurion. Vivid too is the way that the composer conveys the bells in ‘Bredon Hill’, which initially peal joyously but ultimately sound a funeral knell as we move from summer to winter, and with it the death of hope. Vaughan Williams understands too the brilliant irony of the brief fourth song, ‘Oh, when I was in love with you’. In the conversation between the living and the dead in ‘Is my team ploughing?’ – one of the most poignant of all the poems in A Shropshire Lad – Vaughan Williams responds with an almost operatic sense of drama, while the composer creates a true sense of transcendence in his final setting ‘Clun’, a poem full of resignation. It’s no surprise that the premiere of On Wenlock Edge on 15 November 1909 signalled the arrival of a major new British voice.
What a loss Ernest Chausson’s premature death was at just 44 in a cycling accident. Had he lived maybe he’d have been the man to solve the problem facing every French composer of the time – how to absorb Wagnerism within a wholly French idiom. He forms a link between César Franck, his teacher, and Debussy, his protégé and friend. He had in common with Wagner a fascination with epic themes, frequently mythological (as in his sole opera Le Roi Arthus), as well as a lusciousness to his harmonic language, and a heightened sense of yearning in his vocal writing.
These qualities come together to astoundingly moving effect in the Poème de l’amour et de la mer, an ambitious half-hour work originally construed as a song-cycle for voice and orchestra. Like many of Wagner’s music dramas, too, it was a long time in the making: Chausson tussled with it for much of the 1880s, finally finishing it in 1890, though even then he was not entirely happy, and made a further revision in 1893. Part of that struggle may have been down to its unorthodox form, with two vocal movements separated by a purely instrumental inner section.
The text comes from a set of poems by his friend Maurice Bouchor, who was only 20 at the time – and which might help explain their relatively banal sentiments. But like great song-writers from Schubert onwards, Chausson transcends those limitations to spectacular effect. The version we hear this evening was made for voice and piano quintet by Franck Villard. He was born in 1966 and, like Chausson, studied at the Paris Conservatoire and has since worked widely as a conductor and composer. In his arrangement it is the strings who largely take on the part of the orchestra, while the piano frequently duets with the voice, to potent effect. For the brief, purely instrumental, interlude between the two main movements Villard picks up on Chausson’s original orchestration which made prominent use of a cello, giving it the main theme accompanied by piano before the other strings appear.
The evocations of the sea in the outer movements are prescient of what Debussy was to achieve a few years later in La mer, and the sense of surging emotions at love lost in the protagonist himself is wonderfully conveyed by music that resists all temptation to resolve, at least until the final few minutes of the piece, which are devastating in their beauty.
© Harriet Smith
Approximate running time: 73 minutes, no interval
Please note all timings are approximate and subject to change.
This performance is subject to government guidelines.
Programme and performers
Ralph Vaughan Williams On Wenlock Edge
1 ‘On Wenlock Edge’
2 ‘From far, from eve and morning’
3 ‘Is my team ploughing?’
4 ‘Oh, when I was in love with you’
5 ‘Bredon Hill’
6 ‘Clun’
Ernest Chausson Poème de l’amour et de la mer (arr Franck Villard)
1 ‘La fleur des eaux’ (The flower of the waters)
2 Interlude
3 ‘La mort de l’Amour’ (The death of Love)
Ian Bostridge tenor
Dame Sarah Connolly mezzo-soprano
Julius Drake piano
Carducci Quartet
Artist biographies
Ian Bostridge's international recital career takes him to the foremost concert halls of Europe, South East Asia and North America. In opera, he has performed Tamino (Mozart Die Zauberflöte), Jupiter (Handel Semele) and Aschenbach (Britten Death in Venice) at English National Opera, Quint (Britten The Turn of the Screw), Don Ottavio (Mozart Don Giovanni) and Caliban (Adès The Tempest) for the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, title role Jephtha for Opera de Paris, Don Ottavio at the Wiener Staatsoper, Tom Rakewell (Stravinsky The Rake’s Progress) at the Bayerische Staatsoper, Munich, Aschenbach Death in Venice for the Deutsche Oper and Quint at Teatro alla Scala, Milan.
Future highlights include a recital and lecture series for the University of Chicago, Des Knaben Wunderhorn with Barcelona Symphony and Marta Gardolińska, Britten’s War Requiem with Kent Nagano and the Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich and with Philippe Jordan and the San Francisco Symphony, Evangelist St Matthew Passion for Teatro Regio Torino, Bajazet Tamerlano in concert for the Moscow State Philharmonic, Winterreise with Sir Antonio Pappano at the Pierre Boulez Saal Berlin and further performances with jazz pianist Brad Mehldau of his composition for Ian, The Folly of Desire.
His many recordings have won all the major international record prizes and been nominated for fifteen Grammys. Ian’s latest recording for Pentatone of Schubert’s Winterreise with Thomas Ades won the Vocal Recording of the Year 2020 in the International Classical Music Awards. He was awarded a CBE in the 2004 New Year's Honours. In 2016, he was awarded the The Pol Roger Duff Cooper Prize for non-fiction writing for his latest book, Schubert's Winter Journey: Anatomy of an Obsession.
Sarah Connolly was made a DBE in the 2017 Birthday Honors, having previously been awarded a CBE in 2010. In 2020, she was made an Honorary Member of the Royal Philharmonic Society in recognition of her outstanding services to music.
She has sung at the Aldeburgh, Edinburgh, Salzburg and Tanglewood festivals and the BBC Proms where, in 2009, she was a soloist at the Last Night. Opera engagements have taken her around the world from the Metropolitan Opera to the Royal Opera House, the Paris Opera, La Scala Milan, the Munich State Opera and the Bayreuth, Glyndebourne and Aix-en-Provence festivals.
Recent highlights include Fricka in The Ring Cycle at both the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden and the Teatro Real in Madrid and recitals for the Schubertíada a Vilabertran, the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam and for the Grand Théâtre de Genève.
Recent performances on the concert platform have included Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde (Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin & London Philharmonic Orchestra), his Symphony No. 8 (Wiener Symphoniker), Des Knaben Wunderhorn (Orchestre national de Paris) and Tippet’s A Child of our Time (Orchestre de Paris). In the 2018/19 season, Sarah curated a residency at Wigmore Hall.
Julius Drake, described by The New Yorker magazine as the ‘collaborative pianist nonpareil’ lives in London and enjoys an international reputation as one of the finest instrumentalists in his field, collaborating with many of the world’s leading artists, both in recital and on disc. He appears regularly at all the major music centres and festivals: the Aldeburgh, Edinburgh, Munich, Schubertiade, and Salzburg Music Festivals; Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Centre New York; The Kennedy Center, Washington; The Royal Concertgebouw, Amsterdam and Philharmonie, Berlin; and Wigmore Hall and BBC Proms London.
Julius Drake’s most recent recordings include vol 6 in his critically acclaimed Liszt Complete Songs Edition for Hyperion with Julia Kleiter, Paradise Lost (Alpha) with Anna Prohaska and Janacek’s Diary of One who Disappeared with Nicky Spence which won both the 2020 Gramophone Award and BBC Music Magazine Award (Hyperion).
The versatile and award-winning Carducci String Quartet has performed everything from the classic quartet repertoire to new works and even partnered recently with folk-rock icon Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull. Founded in 1997, the ensemble has won numerous international competitions, including the Concert Artists Guild International Competition USA 2007 and First Prize at Finland’s Kuhmo International Chamber Music Competition 2004. In 2016, they took home a Royal Philharmonic Society Award for performances of their cycle of the complete Shostakovich Quartets. Shostakovich15, was accompanied by a recording of quartets 4, 8 and 11 for Signum Classics, to which the quartet added a further volume in spring 2019 (1,2 and 7) acclaimed by Gramophone Magazine for its “…athletic, upfront performances, clear in texture, forthright in tone and bold in articulation.” The quartet has also released a bevy of acclaimed recordings on their own label, Carducci Classics, and their Naxos recordings of the Philip Glass Quartets have had over six million plays on Spotify.
