JAMES
GILCHRIST & ANNA TILBROOK Royal
Northern College
of Music
TENOR James
Gilchrist brought an enticing programme of three song cycles to the Royal
Northern College of Music, appearing with accompanist Anna Tilbrook for
Manchester Chamber Concerts Society.
I can’t
think of any solo singer who commands more respect in the kind of music he
chose – Schumann’s Liederkreis and Dichterliebe, and Vaughan Williams’ Songs Of
Travel – and she is a peerless player in these styles, where the piano says as
much as the voice in interpreting the poetry.
The 12
songs to words by Eichendorff that make up the Liederkreis are vintage dreamy
Romanticism, composed by a young man deeply in love.
I admired
the subtle moments of characterization Gilchrist introduced, the slightly manic
hints he brought to Die Stille, the way the feeling of some songs was projected
into their successors, the touches of horror and apprehension he expressed at
the conclusions of In Der Fremde and Zwielicht, and the pacing and shaping of
the whole circle of emotions.
The piano
postludes shone with beauty, delicacy, pictorial vividness and the occasional
flash of fire: in short, exemplary playing.
Vaughan
Williams’ settings of Robert Louis Stevenson seem less neurotic and more
straightforward than Schumann’s writing. But with James Gilchrist they have the
same thoughtful, multi-layered treatment, with a passionate highpoint in Youth
And Love, a gentle transformation of mood towards the end of the series, and a
very English kind of wistfulness, superbly caught.
The recital
finished with Schumann’s settings of Heinrich Heine’s poetry, probably the most
well known German song cycle of all.
For those
of us who first fell in love with this music and these words in the great
recordings by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, the version in tenor (rather than
baritone) pitch inevitably means a loss of dignity and solidity, but
Gilchrist’s rendering was still deeply thought and telling.
He gave
agonized personality, rather than pent-up frustration, to the desperate centrepiece,
Ich Grolle Nicht, and imbued much of the cycle with gentle longing – an
atmosphere to which Anna Tilbrook contributed in full measure.
*****
Robert
Beale
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