A long drive mitigated by congenial and erudite company, through bosomy green hills under what felt like permanent soft mizzling rain, from one choice little festival on the Welsh borders, Presteigne, to another altogether more remote — Machynlleth, close to the coast, a tiny town (for all that a Welsh king once located his court there), where, in a converted nonconformist chapel, surprising and rewarding events take place.
Not so the first I attended, a recital of poetry and song occasioned by the first world war, trudging through well-worn trenches and pastoral hankerings, the recitation shambling, the singing insensitive, the piano overweening. One left depressed by the subject, and without the compensation of catharsis. But all was utterly changed in the same surroundings only an hour or so later, with a masterclass given by that Welsh national treasure Dame Margaret Price, working with two young baritones (I’ll give the names — Gerard Collet and Johnny McGovern — in the strong hope that we’ll be hearing more of them) and their gifted accompanists, each pair allotted half — six songs — of Schumann’s op.39 Liederkreis.
The choice was inspired — from the very first bars (after all that mediocre Englishry) a composer writing for the piano, not the harmonium! True for Schumann even on an off day, but here he is at his greatest: this cycle, 12 interlinked settings of Eichendorff, is arguably (I’d say unarguably) his supreme achievement in song.
It brought out the best in the young artists and inspired the old artist to a display of her powers at once amusing, instructive and moving. ‘Oh, I can’t sing!’ she’d impatiently disclaim, then disprove herself again and again, with phrases, stanzas, occasionally a song in its entirety. We in the audience were impressed by the beauty and indeed the strength of the vocal equipment, and enthralled by the deeply expressive purposes to which it was applied.
Place after place came alive in the most masterly way. The ‘class’ aspect was best realised through example rather than verbal instruction; one could see and hear the young singers responding, emulating, developing, on the spot. The same with the interventions from the urbane compère Julius Drake, jumping in with suggestions about touch, character, tempi in the accompaniments: the spell-casting horn calls of Lorelei advancing then receding, and its sudden changes of key, texture, tessitura, for instance; or the sharp accents that point up the spareness of In der Fremde.
When he, and she, once or twice found themselves impulsively settling together for most or all of a song, we felt privileged to be present; a bonus as pure, if as unearned, as they are dirty in the nasty commercial world outside that this wonderful fusion of text, music, living performance belies.
The most extraordinary moment of many came when Dame Margaret softly joined in, as one of the baritones sang, a shadow-halo at the upper octave, vibrato-less and dead in tune, adding an extra frisson to the unearthly strangeness of Zwielicht/Twilight — ‘if you have a friend, don’t trust him at this hour…yet by morning all things are new-born…be wary; be cheerful’.
The great singer often began her comments by speaking passages of the poem or important individual words. Here lies my sole reservation: we sometimes couldn’t hear, or overhear, the subsequent close consultations, and many things were not explained. Take munter — last, surprising word of Zweilicht: significant, needing some special coloration; as also in an earlier song where it also disconcerts — far below in the valley, the wedding musicians play munter but the lovely bride weeps. Dame Margaret’s way with the word was unforgettable both times; but no one thought to tell us what the word means in itself (lively/cheerful/alert), and why it’s so vital to the meaning overall.
Otherwise, the only regret was that the session couldn’t be doubled, tripled, quadrupled, enabling all concerned to begin to get really deep into the endlessly surprising and rewarding music.
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