I was browsing the latest Naxos marketing material and was really intrigued by what claimed to be a disk of Tennyson and Housman settings by Sir Arthur Sullivan. It sounded too good to be true and it was. The music was by Sir Arthur Somervell; whose Housman settings I had previously encountered.
The longest work on the disk is called Maud and consists of settings of thirteen of the poems from Tennyson’s monodrama that was extremely popular in the late 19th century. I don’t get Tennyson. I get that he was popular (but then so were Dickens and cholera) but it’s an aesthetic; morbid and sentimental more than dark, that just doesn’t do it for me. Somervell’s settings are not inconsistent with the mood of the text but they are, frankly, dull and predictable. There’s an attempt to elevate the music above the level of contemporary parlour ballads but Somervell doesn’t seem to have either the melodic or rhythmic invention to really pull it off.
Tapestry has a teaser for Rocking Horse Winner up on their 
Façades is a new CD of music by William Walton and Constant Lambert; much of it comparatively unknown. It’s a mix of songs for tenor and piano and music for piano duet. The disk begins with Lambert’s Trois pièces négres for two pianos. The bookends are fairly up tempo jazz inflected numbers with a perhaps Poulenc influenced slow middle section. Curiously only the white notes of the pianos are used. It’s the first touch of what I tend to feel about Lambert’s music; clever, well crafted but, in the last analysis, not very interesting.
To quote an opera by a rather different composer; “it is a curious story”. It’s the 1810s and in Edinburgh one George Thomson (not the one who became a European commissioner!) had a cunning plan to get various composers to do settings of Welsh, Scottish and Irish folksongs for the domestic amateur music making market. One of the composers he engaged was Beethoven (Haydn and Weber were also involved at various times) and a selection of the songs he produced are recorded on a recently issued Naxos disk.
Soundstreams have announced their 2020/21 season and hopefully we will get to see some of it! As ever there’s loads of good stuff starting with Steve Reich being in Toronto for his 85th birthday in April 2021. Other stuff that gets me excited includes:
I’m never quite sure that unaccompanied choral music is quite my thing but The Crossing’s new recording of music by James Primosch caught my eye. It was the idea of the title track; Carthage, on prose by Marilynne Robinson from her novel Housekeeping, which employs the devastated city of Carthage as a metaphor for desire and imagination that drew me in. The image of once-fertile fields, salted and wasted, has haunted my imagination for decades and I wanted to see how it might play out in musical terms. I wasn’t disappointed.
The Toronto Summer Music Festival is off. Not a surprise but it’s the furthest forward I’ve yet seen for cancellations. I think it indicates that there will be a fair amount of lead time required before anybody can schedule anything for sure which likely doesn’t bode well for the Fall seasons. Also off is Tapestry’s Rocking Horse Winner; at least as far as live performances with audience are concerned. Rehearsals are going ahead remotely so we’ll see what Michael Mori and co. manage to pull out of the hat this time!
operaramblings 