Will definitely stay in the memory: Gweneth Ann Rand & Simon Lepper in Judith Weir’s woman.life.song at Wigmore Hall

Gweneth Ann Rand

Florence Price: Some o’These Days, Bewilderment, Laura Bowler: Glue, Gravity, call it what you like…, Roxanna Panufnik: If I Don’t Know, Judith Weir: woman.life.song; Gweneth Ann Rand, Simon Lepper
22 July 2025

Judith Weir’s 2000 song cycle for Jessye Norman gets a compelling and direct performance as part of Gweneth Ann Rand’s typically fearless programme reflecting of women’s music and women’s lives from the comic to the tragic

Judith Weir’s woman.life.song is an iconic work, huge in scale and aims. As Weir herself commented in a recent posting on her website:

“Without doubt the composition of my own that has brought the most complications in its wake is woman.life.song written in 1999 for the great American soprano Jessye Norman. For a start, the enormous libretto (by Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison and Clarissa Estes) resulted in a 45-minute continuous musical setting, daunting for all but the most powerful of singers. And its 19-piece band (the original idea was to team it up with Schoenberg’s Erwartung) is hard to come by.”

On Tuesday 22 July 2025, soprano Gweneth Ann Rand presented a typically fearless programme at Wigmore Hall with pianist Simon Lepper. The centrepiece was Judith Weir‘s woman.life.song in Weir’s more recent version for voice and piano in what Weir believes might have been the first performance of the complete work in this form. The accompanying works were all by women composers, setting texts that reflected in various ways on women’s lives, with music by Florence Price, Laura Bowler and Roxanna Panufnik.

We began with a pair of songs by Florence Price, one an arrangement of a spiritual, Some o’ These Days, the other a setting of Langston Hughes, Bewilderment, yet both imbued with the sound of the spiritual. With engaging and engaged performances from Rand, there was no way that these songs could fail. Whilst both were unfamiliar to me, Rand made us feel that these were old friends.

Laura Bowler’s Glue, Gravity, call it what you like… was commissioned by Rand in 2024 and this was its first London performance. Setting a text by Bowler and her partner Sam Redway, the song had significance for both Bowler and Rand as it was written as a memory of Bowler’s mother who died in 2022. The text explored the fragments that made up the poet’s memory, with Bowler’s music at first hesitant and distracted, the piano barely there. More fluid arioso developed which gave the words real prominence. By turns florid, passionate and vivid, Rand and Lepper brought a sense of underlying excitement as the piece progressed to its climax and then returned to the opening material, the same yet different.

This was followed by something in complete contrast. Roxanna Panufnik’s 2004 cycle, If I Don’t Know set poems from Wendy Cope’s collection of the same name and the work premiered at the Cheltenham Music Festival. Cope’s writing is light-hearted, commenting on life and concerns from a woman’s point of view in a wry manner. I have to confess that I found Cope’s words rather arch, and the transference of them from something read intimately to the grander setting of a song cycle at Wigmore Hall did not do them justice, even with Panufnik’s effective musical support. But I am also aware that Cope’s voice is not really speaking to me, though some of the poems such as ‘Bloody Men’ did strike a real chord. There were seven songs in all, and for all Rand’s powerful advocacy it felt slightly too many.

The engagingly rhapsodic ‘After the Lunch’ was followed by the comedic ‘Being Boring’ where the joke perhaps was overdone. ‘Bloody men’ was vivid and admirably concise, whilst ‘I don’t know’ seemed the beating heart of the cycle with its repeated tolling bell in the piano. ‘An Unusual Cat-Poem’ was brief to the point of pointlessness whilst the unaccompanied ‘By Round Pond’ returned us to more serious concerns. The final song ‘The Uncertainty of the Poet’ moved from the charming to the positively unhinged.

After the interval our focus changed for Judith Weir’s woman.life.song. This consists of seven songs  in three sections which move across a woman’s life with texts in different styles by Maya Angelou, Clarissa Pinkola-Estes and Toni Morrison. Maya Angelou’s contributions bookended the work, both prose rather than poetry, the first ‘On Youth’ opened the cycle whilst ‘On Maturity’ closed it. Clarissa Pinkola-Estes amusing yet perceptive ‘Breasts!! Song of the Innocent Wild-Child’ came next, followed by two texts by Toni Morrison, ‘Edge’ and ‘Eve Remembering’ which explore love and temptation from innocence to maturity. Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ ‘The Mothership: When a Good Mother Sails from This World’ consisted of two separate texts, ‘(Stave I)’ and ‘(Stave II)’ which explored what it was for a mature woman to lose her mother. Then we concluded with Maya Angelou’s ‘On Maturity’.

It is a long work, well over 45 minutes long, and there were moments when the reduction down to just two performers (from 20) rather seemed to stretch the material. But throughout, there was never any doubt of Rand’s commitment and her superb investment in the piece, along with Lepper’s completely unflappable control of his material whether it was rhythmic tapping on the piano’s lid or the complex, florid eflorations of some of the songs.

‘On Youth’ began with rhythmic tapping on the piano and Rand speaking Maya Angelou’s text. This was highly effect, partly thanks to Rand’s beautiful speaking voice. As the piano came in with pitched notes, Lepper introduced a definite melody and it seemed as if Rand was listening and reflecting. ‘Breasts!!’ featured a series of vivid, patter-song-like verses each beginning ‘Oh, Breasts’ as the young woman worries about her not quite nascent breasts, funny yet touching too. There were slower interludes the whole turning remarkably rhapsodic. ‘Edge’ moved the level of complexity as the piano writing was dramatic and complex and this remarkable web of sounds supported a more direct vocal line. The touching words and direct vocal line contrasting with refulgent piano.

The second part was a single song, ‘Eve Remembering’. Here Morrison’s words give us Eve considering and relishing what has happened, reflecting on her experience. Weir combined a richly rhapsodic piano with a striking quasi-chant vocal line, with the vocal line becoming more rhapsodic yet textures spare.

Clarissa Pinkola Estes pair of texts for ‘The Mothership’ were complex in their own right. The first, bringing together memories of the mother began rather spiritual-like with the voice contrasting with the vividly rhythmic piano, but then as the music became freer it built remarkably into a vivid litany of fragments of memory (which harked back in a way to Bowler’s song). The second text used the ship metaphor with the daughter setting off on a journey with the mother’s sails, the music evoking the spiritual, moving from directness to intensity and complexity.

Finally came Angelou’s ‘On Maturity’ where the vocal line moved back from free arioso to spoken, offset by the complex filigree of the piano. The end mixed Rand’s beautifully spoken voice with vividly rhapsodic text.

I had never come across woman.life.song before and I found that in Rand and Lepper’s hands the music had a life and vividness which carried you through the songs in a way by turns intimate and compelling. There was something about the directness of this performance, two performers in Wigmore Hall, that seemed lacking in the 2000 UK premiere at the Royal Albert Hall [on YouTube]. But then I wasn’t there. However, I was at Wigmore Hall and Rand’s performance will definitely stay in the memory.