Edward Price – Baritone with Jonathan Beatty – Piano
It was a real pleasure to welcome back our own, at present dashingly bearded, Ed Price and to be able to enjoy some sparkling accompaniments from Jonny Beatty in the Sidwell Memorial Recital on 1st October.
We started out with Vaughan Williams’ “Songs of Travel”. The cycle was originally published broken into two sets, and in fact the last song was only found by his wife after his death. The poems are by Robert Louis Stevenson, at one time a Hampstead neighbour.
Our traveller is tramping through the rural England so beloved of poets, artists and musicians in the early part of the 20th century, before mechanization changed farming after World War II. It’s a world of misty fields, of rooks circling over corn, and of patient Suffolk Punches, pacing with their great hairy hooves, drawing the plough.
It is interesting (I hope) to compare the genre of walking songs across the repertoire. In Russia the climate is pretty much against it, but in Germany everybody is walking everywhere. There are endless Lieder extolling walking, from the bitter traveller in his frozen landscape in “Winterreise” to stalking huntsmen, and, as you move into folksong, that very German figure of the jolly apprentice moving on as he was expected to do, telling his boss just what he thought of the job, and never mind girls, another guy will be along soon. It reached almost sinister proportions in organizations like the Hitler Youth. But in France, although there are exquisite descriptions of nature in French song, nobody seems to walk about in it very much. Folksongs and childrenʼs songs have so many people keeping the sheep that the countryside must have been quite crowded. Except, of course, when they were spinning, or clodhopping around in their sabots to the sound of the bagpipe and the hurdy-gurdy at a village festival.
But now our traveller has got his hob-nailed boots on, and is on his way. It is generally known that piano accompaniments were not Vaughan Williamsʼ forte, but in the first, and best-known song “The Vagabond”, Jonny got the dogged, somehow very English tramp of the boots across the muddy roads and fields. These are very English songs, you really cannot imagine a non-English singer performing them, and of course Ed, now a mature singer, was able to colour all the words.
Somewhat unexpectedly, Vaughan Williams studied with Ravel, and this showed in the second song “Let Beauty Awake”, giving the piano more interesting material. Ed has a very warm approach, both in his personality and in his singing. The songs could be thought of as a sort of English answer to Lieder, and in fact the song, and even its name “Youth and Love”, was distinctly Schumannesque. Edʼs soft singing was particularly appealing, and just as well, as if the cycle has a weakness it is that virtually all the songs end softly.
We then turned to a totally different, and formidable, challenge. Benjamin Britten’s “Songs and Proverbs of William Blake”. Britten, who wrote most of his song cycles with his tenor partner, Peter Pears, in mind, actually wrote this for Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau to perform at the 1965 Aldburgh Festival and they recorded the songs. So complex and so glittering are the accompaniments that it could almost, without any denigration of the singer, be said to be the accompanistʼs show. The text is very abstruse and complicated, but Ed negotiated its challenges with great confidence and, when required, with considerable power. The song to pull us up short was the setting of the famous poem “Tyger, Tyger burning bright”, at a far faster tempo than any tiger could ever move. This stressed the fear of a human for the animal, specially as Ed scaled down at last to a whisper, while Jonny’s tiger slunk into the undergrowth. A word must be said about the piano part in “The Fly” with maddening little buzz noises anyone who has ever had a fly trapped indoors must recognize. The last song “Every Night and Every Morn” taxed every part of Ed’s range, and had echoes of “Peter Grimes”.
After the interval the whole scene changed. This was the first time I had heard Ed in opera. Of course Mozart wrote a number of splendid roles for baritones – sometimes even two in the same opera. Jonny easily convinced us the piano accompaniments were part of a Mozart concerto! And Ed revealed a great deal of charm. He started with an aria from “Cosi Fan Tutte”, where, like two City boys in the latest Shoreditch bar, Guglielmo is giving his best mate Ferrando, the more diffident tenor, a few points, no details spared, on how to pull the girls. This is all good-natured banter, but Don Giovanni’s famous short aria “Deh vieni alla finestra” has far more cynical undertones. You have to play it straight – that’s how this well-worn chat-up line the Don has no doubt used so often will work. (Though one can’t help noticing that during the opera he doesn’t have any new successes. His exes appear but otherwise he is always foiled.) Ed let it flow, just as it should. Another aspect of the theme comes up in the furious aria of the Count from “The Marriage of Figaro” when he realizes he very well may not get to assert his rights over Susanna. And, of course, we know he doesn’t. Blustering like a sulky teenager, he gives the singer some technical challenges, which Ed tackled with aplomb.
Ed than sang the less obvious aria of Wolfram from “Tannhauser” (when Wagner was still writing arias) and then gave his all in one of Massenet’s fragrant arias “Vision Fugitive” from “Hérodiade”.
And now for some nostalgia for the more mature members of the audience. Ever since one of the most famous Don Giovannis (on and off the stage!) Ezio Pinza, starred in “South Pacific”, “proper” singers have loved to sing the main songs. “Some Enchanted Evening”, which Ed sang at the wedding of our own Chris Cole and Anne Purvis, is a gift, and Ed made the most of it. It’s a wonder by the time we reached “If I Loved You” from “Carousel” that we werenʼt singing along!
He ended on the borderline where musical theatre and opera almost meet, with a very touching and well-varied performance of “Soliloquy”, also from “Carousel”. As the future Dad, wondering how it would be to have a little boy – and then suddenly thinking it might be a girl (and skating on thin ice of political correctness!) he turned in one of the best performances of the night.
Jonny and Ed’s obvious enjoyment of working together, and Jonny’s remarkable versatility in leaping from Lieder style, to “orchestra” to “big band” gives Ed a chance to sing – well anything really! The encore was “This Nearly was Mine”. Not quite right. They nailed it!