Wednesday 11 November 2015

Manchester Evening News review 10 November 2015


JAMES GILCHRIST & ANNA TILBROOK  Royal Northern College of Music

 

TENOR James Gilchrist brought an enticing programme of three song cycles to the Royal Northern College of Music, appearing with accompanist Anna Tilbrook for Manchester Chamber Concerts Society.

I can’t think of any solo singer who commands more respect in the kind of music he chose – Schumann’s Liederkreis and Dichterliebe, and Vaughan Williams’ Songs Of Travel – and she is a peerless player in these styles, where the piano says as much as the voice in interpreting the poetry.

The 12 songs to words by Eichendorff that make up the Liederkreis are vintage dreamy Romanticism, composed by a young man deeply in love.

I admired the subtle moments of characterization Gilchrist introduced, the slightly manic hints he brought to Die Stille, the way the feeling of some songs was projected into their successors, the touches of horror and apprehension he expressed at the conclusions of In Der Fremde and Zwielicht, and the pacing and shaping of the whole circle of emotions.

The piano postludes shone with beauty, delicacy, pictorial vividness and the occasional flash of fire: in short, exemplary playing.

Vaughan Williams’ settings of Robert Louis Stevenson seem less neurotic and more straightforward than Schumann’s writing. But with James Gilchrist they have the same thoughtful, multi-layered treatment, with a passionate highpoint in Youth And Love, a gentle transformation of mood towards the end of the series, and a very English kind of wistfulness, superbly caught.

The recital finished with Schumann’s settings of Heinrich Heine’s poetry, probably the most well known German song cycle of all.

For those of us who first fell in love with this music and these words in the great recordings by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, the version in tenor (rather than baritone) pitch inevitably means a loss of dignity and solidity, but Gilchrist’s rendering was still deeply thought and telling.

He gave agonized personality, rather than pent-up frustration, to the desperate centrepiece, Ich Grolle Nicht, and imbued much of the cycle with gentle longing – an atmosphere to which Anna Tilbrook contributed in full measure.

 

*****

Robert Beale

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