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Recital
29 April 2001
Glyndebourne
Simon Keenlyside
Malcolm Martineau
Programme
Wolgang Amadeus Mozart:
spri rimorsi atroci
“Nur mutig mein Herze…” from Zaide K344
An Chloe K 524
Franz Schubert:
An die Leier D737
Auf der Donau D553
Fischerweise D 881
Prometheus D 764
Pensa, che questo istante D 76
L'incanto degli occhi D 902/1
Auf der Bruck D 853
Gustav Mahler:
Des Antonius von Padua Fischpredigt
Ich ging mit lust
Wer hat dies Liedlein erdacht?
Piotr Tchaikovsky:
Serenada Don Zhuana op. 38/1
Alexander Glazunov:
Oriental romance op. 27/2
Sergei Rachmaninov:
The dream op 38/5
The Fountain op 26/11
Gabriel Fauré:
Mandoline op 58/1
En sourdine op 58/2
Green
Fleur jetée op 39/2
Le pays des rêves op 39/3
Notre amour op 23/2
Le secret op 23/3
Apres un reve
Le papillon et la fleur op 1/1
Serenata toscana op 3/2
What the critics say
Robert Thicknesse for The Times, 2 May 2001
Forty quid might seem a bit steep for an hour-and-a-half of piano-accompanied songs, but baritone Simon Keenlyside’s reputation is such that a gloomy Sunday Glyndebourne — disinfectant mats at the entrance and all — had no trouble gathering a decent crowd for this recital of songs by Schubert, Fauré and others, with the incomparable Malcolm Martineau at the keyboard.
Keenlyside is a pleasantly anxious presence on stage, pacing, fidgeting and full of nervous energy. He knows his bad habits, of course, and apologised for them with disarming grace, a trait which pervades his performance. He is an outstandingly honest singer, expressive in an understated way, who makes you believe what he is singing.
This was a relaxed programme, and he might have done better to warm up the audience with something a bit more upbeat than Schubert’s Auf der Donau, a slightly glum number in which the poet’s boat becomes a metaphor for his insecurity.
An die Leier was more in tune with Keenlyside’s bearing, full of a self-mocking frustration that his lyre will produce only droopy love-songs when he wants it to strum out heroic lays. This was sung with a hesitant diffidence, highlighted by the piano’s doomed attempts to discover the desired muscular tone, conveying the slight vulnerability that is the singer’s strongest suit.
There were a few hints that Keenlyside was not in top voice: some of his mezza-voce lacked focus, and there were audible gear-changes between registers. Schubert set Goethe’s Prometheus as a dramatic recitative, full of storming left-hand octaves, its verses taking the singer through a range of moods from tender to defiant, and Keenlyside’s higher head-notes were not all that they might have been.
But he had sorted this out by the time he got to the Fauré songs he obviously loves, particularly Le pays des rêves, a gentle barcarolle sung in a very French type of mixed head-voice, intimate and lulling. The advantage of an accompanist as light-fingered as Martineau was that this could be sung at the gentlest level and every word be clearly heard.
The rest of the recital — a bit of Mozart and three Russian songs — completed the picture of singer and pianist at one and finding meaning through the smallest gesture. The key to Keenlyside is communication: his singing has a conversational tone that seems directed to each member of the audience individually, and Glyndebourne can rarely have seemed more cosy.