A weekly review from our critic-in-residence, Alastair Macaulay:
The tenor Ian Bostridge is sixty, but sounds much younger. On Sunday 6 July, he and the master Schubertian pianist Steven Osborne gave a recital of Schubert’s “Schwanengesang”, bisected by six Debussy mélodies, at the Wigmore Hall. Bostridge remains the ideal of English chorister style, scrupulous and intellectual – even while infusing that with a very un-English kind of intensity. My memory is that, in the 1990s, he tended to phrase by either leaning heavily onto notes (ironing away the vibrato) or by relaxing into them (letting the vibrato relax into action), Today, however, his phrasing is less mannered, with the voice poised admirably on the breath throughout the line vocal line, still full of youthful bloom and honey.
And those lines! Physically, he has always been a narrow beanpole, but he commands a length of breath that seems impossible from such a frame. Such breath control sounds as if it emanates from deep inner relaxation, yet that’s the opposite of how Bostridge usually looks when singing. Often he appears wracked. His torso bends and tips every which way, his skinny legs bend and cross each other, his face screws itself into a vast array of tense expressions. And though his vocal line has more evennness of flow than years ago, he still exerts himself to impose such expressivity onto many phrases that it’s as if he can’t trust his music to reveal its own meaning: he must impose meanings of his own.
So he’s a fascinatingly self-contradictory artist, thoroughly English and intensely anti-English at the same time, both brainy and visceral, apparently uncomfortable within his own skin but performing because music makes him. He’s different in every song, with marvellous effects in several – better than ever now, he knows how to draw the house into his mind with a sustained diminuendo or pianissimo – and yet we still experience him more as a brain than as a heart. He and Osborne worked together harmoniously until their encore, Fauré’s “Clair de lune”, when Bostridge came unstuck – and, endearingly, stopped to laugh at himself, assuring Osborne that they needed to begin again. Osborne’s manner at every point was unobtrusive, while providing the architectural framework and pulse. Even so, the most heartstopping moments came from Osborne, such as in the spectral ripples that adorn “Die Stadt”.
With the Irish soprano Ailish Tynan, singing songs from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries by Mozart, Schubert, Lachner, Spohr, and Schumann with pianist Malcolm Martineau and clarinettist Michael Collins at a Wigmore lunchtime recital on June 23 , both heart and refinement were abundantly present. Her voice has purity, warmth, and unity: there’s no point when we feel her brain detaching itself to add further layers. And so the recital’s climactic song, Schubert’s “Shepherd on the Rock” (“Der Hirt auf dem Felsen”), poured forth with the artless innocence of perfect pastoral, even though this innocence is multifaceted: “à la mortal”, finely chequered”, to use a haunting phrase of Jane Austen’s “Mansfield Park”.
Two very unalike singers were among the stars of the London Symphony Orchestra’s evening of Pride classical music on the Fourth of July at the Barbican Hall. To close the programme’s first half, the American mezzosoprano Jamie Barton joined conductor Oliver Zeffman for three big vocal numbers: the song “Or am I in a rut?” by composer Jake Heggie, the aria “Mon coeur s’ouvre à ta voix” from Saint-Saëns’s “Samson et Dalila”, and – bringing the Proud audience to its feet – Harold Arlene’s “Somewhere over the Rainbow” from “The Wizard of Oz”. Barton’s public persona is emblematic of Pride: she’s outgoing, ebullient, wearing a fulsome diva gown and modern hair (shorn at the sides). She isn’t heard to best advantage in the breadths of the Barbican Hall, but hers is a most remarkable voice, spanning from firm chest register to glowing high notes. She can land individual words effectively, but not always convey the thought of a whole clause or sentence. I’ve heard her on both sides of the Atlantic without yet feeling her many remarkable qualities have found complete focus.
The presenter Jonny Woo introduced the concert’s second half with an introductory speech hailing George Benjamin’s opera “Written on Skin” (2012) as perhaps the greatest opera of the twenty-first century, I admire it too, though I wish it were better known. (And I’m proud to live in an era when there is a wide and strong variety of candidates for Greatest Twentyfirst-Century Opera.) With Benjamin in the audience, we were given his orchestral cantata “Dream of the Song” (2015): new to me, imaginative and gripping.
Its vocal soloist – new to me – was the glamorous, tall, and commanding Persian-Canadian countertenor Cameron Shahbazi. I’ve been inclined to resist the counter-tenor voice, but this century has brought us so many of them that I’ve long since learnt not to generalise. Shahbazi’s voice has exceptional presence: you can feel his whole stance and mind in his production of tone, as well as in his sculptural shaping of a phrase. This is a countertenor voice with weight, authority, lustre, heroism.
Alastair Macaulay
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