Yahoo Movies Leeds Lieder festival finale review – a beautifully voiced inquiry into gender
Leeds Lieder festival packed a great deal – masterclasses and lectures as well as song recitals – into its four days, with all the events streamed online as well as given before live audiences in Leeds Town Hall. Its finale was a recital by the soprano Carolyn Sampson and baritone Roderick Williams, accompanied by the festival’s artistic director Joseph Middleton, that explored the question of gender in song.
It was a cleverly devised, beautifully polished programme, with the two singers taking on songs usually allotted to the opposite sex – Sampson began with two numbers from Schubert’s Die Schöne Mullerin, and Williams with two from Schumann’s Frauenliebe und -leben, for instance – and also inviting the audience to comment on the switches, as well as to nominate the songs they included in a final group; settings by Britten, Schubert, Debussy and Butterworth were among the choices.
But the centrepiece was the premiere of a specially commissioned song cycle for the two voices by Hannah Kendall. Rosalind sets poems by Sabrina Mahfouz, exploring the elusive central character in Shakespeare’s As You Like It, but it’s a rather restrained, one-paced piece, with spare piano accompaniments and occasional interventions from a music box and a harmonica, but too little distinction between the songs to make the sequence dramatically compelling.
Earlier the same day a recital on the theme of solitude by the tenor James Gilchrist and pianist Anna Tilbrook had included Schubert’s Einsamkeit and a selection from Samuel Barber’s Hermit Songs alongside Under Alter’d Skies, a song-cycle written for them four years ago by Jonathan Dove, to poems from Tennyson’s Im Memoriam. They are elegantly shaped settings, alive to every nuance of the texts, which fitted perfectly into this introspective scheme.
