Britten Finzi Tippett staged, Kings Place

Is English song like the (supposed) English psyche, reticent and unassuming? Britten Winter Words, Finzi A Young Man's Exhortation and Tippett Boyhood's End would be an ambitious programme at any time, but augmenting live perforance with interactive video and digital media? James Gilchrist and Anna Tilbrook's recital was part of the Kings Place Transition Projects series by Netia Jones,

The theme was "Before Life and After", a self consciously trendy title for three groups of songs about boyhood relived in memory. Both Britten and Finzi chose poems by Thomas Hardy, fixing the time frame firmly in the past. A small boy is sent alone off to school with a key to his "box" round his neck. Boys still get shipped off to boarding school, but now their boxes are supplemented by laptops, games and mobiles. The kind of childhood in these songs is solitary. Boys create their own worlds tnrough their imaginations. Britten's Winter Words are chilling. A boy in a train station plays his violin to amuse an old man. Who turns out to be handcuffed to a policeman. Nowadays, we'd scream "paedophile". Yet the boy's act of kindness is so straightforward,  it reflects on us that we've lost this innocence.

Netia Jones' films are semi-abstract. Images of garden gates, enclosing or opening onto empty roads, trees in winter stripped of leaves. Gilchrist sits at an old fashioned desk, with books, a thermos, an antique bar heater. This isn't our world, even though video screens surround him. It feels cold and austere, yet this staging draws you into an inner world that's all the more intense and creative because there are no comforts to dull the senses.

Britten's Winter Words were written in 1954, though they evoke a much earlier period. Hear The Choirmaster's Burial here)  Gilchrist's style is more immediate and direct, conveying meaning with intelligence : he's specially beautiful in the words decorated with ornate melismas, which sound like pealing bells.  Brilliantly, Jones's staging recreates the time warp. Gilchrist shuffles out of the "room" into the night, alone while Anna Tilbrook plays John Ireland's Soliloquy. It feels like floating down a time tunnel.

The six songs from Finzi's A Young Man's Exhortation which Gilchrist and Tilbrook chose for this recital aren't so much songs about boyhood per se as about memory and the passing of time. "The first fire since the summer is lit" sings Gilchrist, "and it's smoking into the room". Evenings are drawing in early, youth fades like the change of season. Jones's videos are like old photographs, whose images have blurred with time. Very evocative, supplementing the songs with an extra layer of mystery.

For mystery is the essence of childhood. Michael Tippett's Boyhood's End was written for Peter Pears in 1953 (contemporary with Winter Words),  It's a setting of a prose poem by William Henry Hudson who grew up in South America and never quite adjusted to living in cold and colourless Britain. Hudson describes experiences with the intense lucidity one might see through a microscope. Gilchrist sings of overpowering heat: Jones's images are of sunshine seen through a haze of leaves. Hudson's boy communes intimately with nature around him. Adult reality is very far away. Pears struggled with the unusual metre: Gilchrist has no problems, for a sense of wonder comes naturally to him, and his lucid delivery feels effortless and direct. He really is a born character-singer. Artifice is the least thing you'd want in this extended song, so semi-staging works well. You hear Gilchrist's light high tenor and see the boy on the projected screen, raising his arms in a gesture that's at once childlike and primeval.

This staging pulled together four disparate works so well thet it would have been churlish to expect an encore. Yet on my way home I kept thinking of Finzi's Childhood among the Ferns, also to Thomas Hardy. A boy hides under a dense canopy of tall ferns while rain pours down. He imagines he's in a secret nest. When the sun dries the ferns out, he smells the scent of the undergrowth and feels the warmth. "I could live on here this til Death" he muses, then cries, "Why should I have to grow to man's estate, And this afar-noises World perambulate?'  Why didn't Britten and Tippett jump on this poem?

James Gilchrist Die Schöne Müllerin Oxford Lieder Festival

Twenty-five years ago I heard Die Schöne Müllerin in a country church beside the Thames in South Oxfordshire. “How lovely”, said the vicar, noting that the village is famous for its old mill. Had he known the cycle he might not have been so thrilled! Beneath the sunlit rippling of the brook in Schubert’s music lies menace indeed.

In an excellent pre performance talk, James Gilchrist made the point of contrasting the brightness of the music with the darkness of its content. All around the young miller, nature blossoms, but he’s totally indifferent. He lives in a vacuum, disconnected from reality. The world hums steadily along but he’s hyperactive, swinging from one extreme to another. He hears voices, becomes violent and finally throws himself into the millpond. It’s not pretty. Nowadays, he’d be heavily medicated and thrown into the community without support, harming others as well as himself.

The vernal landscape deceives, as it’s meant to. Hence exquisite performances like Fritz Wunderlich, where you’re taken in by the sheer beauty of the voice. That’s why Matthias Goerne’s version a few years back was so shocking. “There’s nothing cute about teenage suicide”, he said, producing a version so psychologically penetrating that it’s frightening to listen to, even though it’s groundbreaking and a superlative performance. Ian Bostridge, in his more recent work with Mitsuko Uchida, takes another path, connecting the spirit of the brook to the earth spirits and folk magic so dear to the Romantic imagination. James Gilchrist has found yet another distinctive approach, which is quite an achievement in a cycle as frequently performed as this.

I made a special effort to hear this concert as I thought it would be well suited to Gilchrist’s style and I was right. Firstly, his clear, lucid singing works extremely well for it’s direct and naturalistic : songs like this need an understated, almost conversational style for what we are hearing are highly personal “unspoken thoughts”. Secondly, Gilchrist doesn’t declaim, he convinces by genuinely communicating the inner world of his protagonist. Like a true method actor, his characterization comes from understanding how the young man thinks, alien as it may be to “normal” people, so the performance grows from this. Thirdly, he understands how the poetry and music work as external commentary, following the miller’s descent towards death. There’s a journey here, just as there is in Winterreise.

Gilchrist’s young miller is most certainly delusional, a very sick loner unable to form even the most basic of relationships. As he approaches the mill, he’s almost manic with expectation, the voice taking on a shrill excitement. Peter Schreier’s miller had a similar unnerving intensity. This is observant, for the miller’s mind is lit up with an unnaturally bright light : he sees things in extremes. Phrases repeat, like double takes, as if the miller is contemplating his own vision. The rhythms of the millwheel and brook are resolute, Anna Tilbrook’s playing captures the relentless flow. The miller’s fundamental weakness is thrown into contrast : he doesn’t think he’s as strong as the apprentices : Ungeduld is a list of the things he’d like to do, but can’t.

In some interpretations, Mein! is a moment of hope. But Gilchrist appreciates how it connects to the previous song, Tränenregen, where the miller at last gets to spend time with the girl. Instead of talking to her, he talks to the brook ! No wonder she makes her excuses and leaves. To anyone else, that would be rejection, but suddenly the miller thinks he’s won the girl. Gilchrist’s Mein! is heartbreaking, because the ecstasy is so clearly delusional. The miller “feels” intensely, therefore assumes everyone else feels as he does, without compromise. As Gilchrist shows, this joyous song is the beginning of the end. The miller’s jealousy and anger seem quite healthy in comparison. Just as the brook misleads deceptively, Schubert builds in deceptively happy music at the grimmest movements.

Gilchrist and Tilbrook use silence to create space the two final songs, for they are the threshold from which there is no return. When the miller stops being hyperactively manic, he becomes numb, unable to resist the brook’s lethal powers. This is also tn opportunity for Gilchrist to comment as an observer. All along, he’s acknowledged the miller’s mania accurately, but with sympathy rather than judgement : the poor lad is no grotesque. Gilchrist doesn’t look “at” him, but “with” him. In the end, though, he can’t go where the miller goes. These two songs are trickier than they seem, for the singer has to express sympathy yet detachment. Tenderness is important for the miller has suffered so much. Yet listen to what the brook is saying : It blames the huntsman, it blames the girl, the böses Mägdelein, who still has the power to wake the drowned boy ! Give into the brooks seductive lies and enter into the madness. Gilchrist sings gently, but he knows this is no lullaby, it’s dangerous.

This was one of the key concerts in this year’s Oxford Lieder Festival, and for good reason. Oxford Lieder is dedicated to extending the art of Lieder, making people think how and why it’s such a special art form. Gilchrist demonstrates exactly the sort of intelligence and sensitivity that makes good Lieder singing. This was a masterclass in itself.

See the review and the lovely pic :

http://www.musicweb-international.com/SandH/2008/Jul-Dec08/olf1210.htm

Please note, James Gilchrist has recorded this on Orchid, to be issued late September 2009