Ana Roxanne returns with an album on which she wants her voice to be clearly heard. To that end she has removed the tape noise, looping and layering that has dressed the vocal in the past, so that Poem 1 employs a raw presentation of her, ‘heartbroken and reflective’.
The piano assumes greater importance, with Roxanne noticeably shifting towards classical music, both in titles (Berceuse in A-flat minor, Op. 45) and in her use of source material, with One Shall Sleep taking its lead (or should that be lied?) from a Robert Schumann song.
What’s the music like?
In a word, intense. Roxanne’s voice is an extraordinary instrument, and leaving it in a raw state was the right way to go for maximum emotional impact on these songs.
The music is slow, which only heightens the strength of feeling, the concentrated impact akin to that of a David Lynch movie. For Roxanne could easily have been the centrepiece of Twin Peaks on this evidence, the likes of Untitled II reaching almost uncomfortable strength of emotion as she somehow controls the vocals. Berceuse in A-flat minor, Op. 45 is one of the standout pieces, just Roxanne and her listener in the room, while the Schumann-inspired One Shall Sleep is preoccupied with feelings of loss and grief.
The close-up recording means the intake of breath can be clearly heard on Cover Me, while Wishful (draft) finds deeper hues in the production.
Does it all work?
It does, though given the strength of emotion it helps for the listener to be in the right mood to appreciate Ana Roxanne’s power as a vocalist.
Is it recommended?
Yes. A powerful song cycle for modern times, headed by an extraordinary voice.
For fans of… Julee Cruise, Cocteau Twins, Keeley Forsyth
Small Treasures presents a typically inventive programme compiled by pianist Sarah Beth Briggs. In it she presents works by a trio of inseparable Romantic composers, with late-ish Robert Schumann, lesser-heard Clara Schumann and very late Brahms, his final compositions for solo piano.
Complementing these are thoughts from two members of Les Six, Germaine Tailleferre and Francis Poulenc – with the bonus of a cheeky encore from Mozart.
What’s the music like?
In a word, lovely. Briggs is a strong communicator, and finds the personal heart of Schumann’s Waldszenen – which is actually quite a Christmassy set of pieces. She particularly enjoys the intimacy of character pieces like Einsame Blumen (Lonely Flowers) and the delicate but rather haunting Vogel als Prophet(The Prophet Bird), beautifully played here.
A tender account of Robert’s Arabeske is a welcome bonus, an intimate counterpart to the more extrovert Impromptu of Clara. Written in c1844, the piece floats freely on the air in Briggs’s hands. By contrast the Larghetto, first of the Quatre Pièces Fugitives, inhabits a more confidential world, one furthered by a restless ‘un poco agitato’. The Andante espressivo, easily the most substantial of the four, is more serene, and it is tempting to draw a link between this and the mood of Robert’s Traumerei, from Kinderszenen. The Scherzo with which the quartet finishes is charmingly elusive, with clarity the watchword of this interpretation,
Poulenc’s Trois Novelettes are typically mischievous and elegant by turn, spicy harmonies and bittersweet melodies complementing each other, before Tailleferre’s Sicilienne, a charming triple-time excursion with a bittersweet edge.
The Brahms Op.119 pieces are serious but have plenty of air too, and the final majestic Rhapsody is grand but not over-imposing, Briggs resisting the temptation to go for volume over expression.
Does it all work?
It does – and the album is easy to listen to the whole way through, the lightness of the Mozart Eine Kleine Gigue complementing the Brahms at the end. Some of the classic recordings of the Brahms and Schumann pieces arguably find more angst, but these finely played accounts are a treat, especially in context.
Is it recommended?
It is. Rather than visit a playlist on your go-to streaming service, you can just put this album on to create a very satisfying recital. Small Treasures, indeed – as is Sarah’s dog, who joins her on the album artwork!
Listen / Buy
You can listen to Small Treasures on Tidal here, while you can explore purchase options on the Presto website
Program including songs by Robert and Clara Schumann, Richard Strauss. Full repertoire list at the bottom of this review
Bechstein Hall, London, 28 March 2025
by John Earls. Photo credit below (c) John Earls
Scottish tenor Matthew McKinney is the winner of the 2024 Kathleen Ferrier Awards and there was quite a sense of anticipation for this recital with pianist Roelof Temmingh at the suitably intimate Bechstein Hall.
Performance is of course the key element in voice and piano recitals such as this. But it is also exciting to be presented with a programme that has clearly been put together with such thought and care. Under the theme of Finding Freedom this programme consisted of two parts. The first was an alternating Clara and Robert Schumann affair, the second a more eclectic but no less engaging mix.
The Schumanns’ set consisted of rotating Clara and Robert Schumann songs neatly threaded together in a lovers’ exchange. It demonstrated not only the consideration and skill of the programming but the quality of Clara’s as well as Robert’s songwriting. McKinney’s singing was beautiful throughout.
The set also included two pieces of recited poetry, Afrikaans poet Breyten Breytenbach’s Red-breasted Dove and Rabindranath Tagore’s Unending Love, both of which deftly complimented the sentiment.
For the first half the audience was requested to save applause until the end of the set, entirely appropriate for the mood and respectfully observed. For the second half however McKinney advised “please do clap any time you want to”. And just as well as this was a much more varied affair including a couple of Robert Schumann solo piano pieces for Temmingh to shine.
Opening with Frank Bridge’s Love Went A-Riding it also included two Benjamin Britten songs, a forceful Batter My Heart (from The Holy Sonnets of John Donne) immediately followed by a tender Sonnetto XXX (from Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo), and a rendition of Tosti’s Marechiare that was full of brio and panache.
There then followed a lovely and affecting sequence. Rebecca Clarke’s I’ll Bid My Heart Be Still (originally composed for viola but ‘reimagined’ here for voice), Robbie Burns’ Ae Fond Kiss (McKinney unaccompanied) and Temmingh’s own Verjaarsdagbrief (Birthday Letter) based on a letter written by his grandfather to his grandmother and sang in Afrikaans by McKinney who then looped back to Ae Fond Kiss. The audience silence afterwards was marked and sincere.
The set concluded with a couple of well delivered Richard Strauss songs which led to the inevitable and deserved calls for an encore which McKinney admitted they didn’t have so we got a repeat of the magnificent Marechiare which was gratefully received.
Matthew McKinney and Roelof Temmingh performed the following repertoire:
Breytenbach Red-breasted dove Clara Schumann and Robert Schumann songs interspersed: Clara Ich stand in dunkeln Träumen Op.13/1, Liebeszauber Op.13/3, Volkslied, Lorelei, Robert Der Nussbaum Op.25/3, Volksliedchen Op.51/2, Zwielicht Op.39/10, Kreisleriana Op.16/8 (solo piano), Mondnacht Op.39/5 Tagore Unending love Clara Der Mond kommt still gegangen Op.13/4, Die stille Lotosblume Op.13/6 Robert Die Lotosblume Op.25/7, Widmung Op.25/1
Bridge Love went a-riding H.114 Weir Sweet Little Red Feet (from The Voice of Desire) Robert Schumann Ritter vom Steckenpferd Op.15/9 Auden What’s in your mind, my dove, my coney? Britten Batter my heart Op.35/2, Sonnetto XXX Op.22/3 Robert Schumann Vogel als Prophet Op.82/7 Tosti Marechiare Clarke I’ll bid my heart be still (reimagined); Trad Scots Ae fond kiss Temmingh Verjaarsdagbrief Richard Strauss Befreit Op.39/4, Zueignung Op.10/1
John Earls is Director of Research at Unite the Union. He posts on Bluesky and tweets / updates his ‘X’ content at @john_earls
Ives Four Ragtime Dances (1902-04, rev. 1916) Fugue in Four Keys on ‘The Shining Shore’ (c1903) The Pond (c1906, rev, c1912-13) The Rainbow (first version, 1914) An Old Song Deranged (c1903) Skit for Danbury Fair (c1909, real. Sinclair) The Gong on the Hook and Ladder or Fireman’s Parade on Main Street (c1911, rev. 1934) Chromâtimelôdtune (c1923, real. Singleton) Tone Roads – no.1 (c1913-14); no.3 (c1911/13-14) Set of Incomplete Works and Fragments (ed. Singleton/Sinclair, 1974) March no.2, with ‘Son of a Gambolier’ (c1892) March no.3, with ‘My Old Kentucky Home’ (c1893) March ‘The Circus Band’ (c1898-99, rev. 1932-33) Arrangements (1896-97) – Schubert: Marche militaire in D, D733 No. 1 (1818). Schumann: Valse noble, Op. 9 No. 4 (1834-35). Schubert: Impromptu in C minor, D899 No. 1 (1827)
Orchestra New England, Orquesta Sinfónica de Navarra (arrangements) / James Sinclair
Naxos American Classics 8.559954 [75’43”] Editions John Kirkpatrick, Jacques-Louis Monod, James Sinclair, Kenneth Singleton and Richard Swift Producers Neely Bruce, Jan Swafford Engineers Benjamin Schwarz with Jonathan Galle and Gonzalo Noqué
Recorded 24/25 October 2023 at Auditorio Barañaín, Pamplona-Navarra, Spain (arrangements), 12-14 March 2024 at Colony Hall/Choate Rosemary Hall, Wallingford CT, USA
Reviewed by Richard Whitehouse
What’s the story?
Naxos continues its long-term series devoted to the orchestral music of Charles Ives with this volume of shorter pieces and arrangements, several of them recorded for the first time and conducted by James Sinclair, whose involvement with the composer now stretches back across 50 years.
What’s the music like?
Miniatures for a variety of forces are found right across the four decades of Ives’s composing and range from unformed experiments to perfectly realized exemplars of his idiom. Many of these were collated in the dozen or so Sets that Ives assembled at various stages in his career (recorded on Naxos 8.559917) while there are various others which resist any such compiling, and these can mostly be found here – often in critical editions prepared by a formidable team of Ives scholars, hence rounding out the picture of his creativity in the most immediate terms.
Written at the outset of the genre’s golden age, the Four Ragtime Dances neatly complement each other as regards form and content; elements from each finding their way into the second movement (The Rockstrewn Hills) from the Second Orchestral Set, which builds upon their anarchic humour accordingly. Following the shimmering polytonal ambivalence of the Fugue on ‘The Shining Shore’, the unworldly evocations The Pond and The Rainbow find Ives at his most intimate and confessional – as does the admittedly more genial An Old Song Deranged. Not so Skit for Danbury Fair, its inherent iconoclasm finding greater focus in the graphically descriptive The Gong on the Hook and Ladder or contrasting Tone Roads Nos. 1 and 3 which embody Ives’s thinking on indivisibility of life and music in the most uncompromising terms.
It was once thought Chromâtimelôdtune might be the missing Tone Road No. 2, yet this late and possibly incomplete piece is likely an acerbic response to the Modernism emerging from post-war Europe which seemingly preoccupied Ives in those twilight years of his composing. The three song-based Marches date from an earlier and ostensibly more carefree phase, their debunking couched in humorous terms, while the Set of Incomplete Works and Fragments is a judiciously conceived entity that should not have had to wait 50 years for its first recording. The orchestrations are from Ives’s study with Horatio Parker at Yale: that of Schubert’s First Marche Militaire and Schumann’s Valse noble (from Carnaval) are expert but anonymous, that of Schubert’s First Impromptu results in a ‘theme and variations’ of striking prescience.
Does it all work?
Yes, inasmuch that the effectiveness of these pieces largely depends on the conviction of their performers and, with Sinclair at the helm, this can be taken for granted. As can the excellence of Orchestra New England in repertoire it has often been playing for decades, and if Orquesta Sinfónica de Navarra might appear an unlikely choice for Ives’s undergraduate arrangements, it acquits itself admirably. The sound throughout is unexceptionally fine, and Sinclair’s own annotations are succinctly informative as to the genesis and context of some intriguing music.
Is it recommended?
Indeed, this is a necessary addition to a valuable series – hopefully to be continued before too long with recordings of the Fourth Symphony and Universe Symphony as partially realized by David Porter, of which Sinclair gave a memorable account at the Aldeburgh Festival in 2012.
Listen & Buy
For buying options, you can visit the Naxos website – or listen to the recording on Tidal below:
Schumann Piano Concerto in A minor Op.54 (1841-5) Smetana Má vlast (1874-9)
Vikingur Ólafsson (piano), Berliner Philharmoniker / Kirill Petrenko
Royal Albert Hall, London Saturday 31 August 2024
reviewed by Richard Whitehouse Photos (c) Chris Christodoulou
This first concert in its latest Proms visit by the Berliner Philharmoniker and chief conductor Kirill Petrenko featured a complete performance of Smetana’s Má vlast as the second half of a programme that, at barely the length of an average Mahler symphony, need not be unusual.
Few would, in any case, object to Vikingur Ólafsson tackle Schumann’s Piano Concerto in an account as dextrously articulated as it was unerringly proportioned. Not least an initial Allegro such as avoided any tendency to mid-tempo ‘drift’, those subtly contrasted themes building a cumulative impetus carried into the combative cadenza then a coda whose tensile energy was judged to a nicety by Petrenko. Some might have felt the Intermezzo too interventionist in its alternation of capriciousness and pathos, but absence of the cutesiness and cloying was more than its own justification and not least when that transition into the final Allegro had such an expectancy. Rhythmically supple with unwavering focus on its overall continuity, this set the seal on a reading whose technical finesse and interpretative insight ensured a riveting listen.
Ólafsson caused some stir at these concerts three years ago with Bach and Mozart concertos, and it was the former composer who provided the encore: the Adagio from the Fourth Organ Sonata (BWV528), transcribed here by August Stradel and rendered with understated poise.
More Czech music so soon after the Czech Philharmonic’s brace of Proms might have been too much of a good thing, but Petrenko’s Má vlast was very different from Jakub Hrůša’s in its lithe expression and streamlined textures. Nor was there was any lack of emotional depth – hence those earlier stages of Vyšehrad as it emerged eloquently on harps towards a fervent climax, its dramatic central section of a razor-sharp precision before subsiding into the main theme’s moving return. Vltava was scenically evocative and formally cohesive as it took in folk-dance, nocturnal landscape and treacherous rapids prior to its resplendent emergence in Prague, then Šárka unfolded its narrative of a matriarchal icon and her heroic demise with an impulsiveness that went into overdrive – without being overdriven – at its dramatic close.
It may be more generalized as to content, but the initial half of From Bohemia’s Woods and Fields is spellbinding as it conjures a pantheist ecstasy (in the process, anticipating Janáček and Minimalism) to which the BPO players were audibly attuned – Petrenko mindful not to overstate the relative blatancy of what follows. Most impressive, even so, were the final two stages whose gaunt rhetoric and granitic sound-world most often make for uneasy listening. Not here, however, as Petrenko gauged the motivic eddying of Tábor so that its underlying momentum held good through to the inevitable segue into Blaník. Emotional tension here was unremitting, the intensive interplay of Vyšehrad-theme with Hussite-chorale building to an apotheosis of Beethovenian power before letting loose for a coda of visceral exhilaration.
Its composite nature makes Má vlast difficult to sustain in performance, but there could be no doubt Petrenko managed this through his and the BPO’s acute yet never wanton control over every facet of the greater concept. A memorable performance and an impressive achievement.
Arcana.fm 