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Recital
Monday 28 August 2006
Queens Hall, Edinburgh
As part of the Edinburgh Festival
Simon Keenlyside Baritone
Malcolm Martineau Piano
From the Edinburgh Festival Website
http://www.eif.co.uk/E160_Simon_Keenlyside_Baritone_Malcolm_Martineau_Piano_.php
Simon Keenlyside is one of the most thrilling singers of his generation. Equally at home in the concert hall and opera house, he is renowned for his exciting stage presence.‘Keenlyside’s physicality puts him in a league of his own among baritones… singing with both virile tone and great poetry.’ - The Sunday Telegraph
Additional info:Peter Pears picked songs and texts from a selection of works by William Blake – Songs of Innocence, Songs of Experience, Auguries of Innocence and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell – that Britten then made into this song cycle.
Grainger:
The Sprig of Thyme
Bridge:
Love Went A-Riding
Somerville:
Birds in the High Hall Garden
Warlock:
Piggesnie
Howells:
The Little Boy Lost
Holst:
Betelgeuse
Britten: Songs and Proverbs of William Blake
London
The Chimney Sweep
A Poison Tree
The Tyger
The Fly
Ah! Sun-Flower
Every Night and Every Morning
Schubert:
An die Leier D737
Stimme der Liebe D412
Fischerlied D351
Fischerweise D881
Im Walde (Waldersnacht) D708
Brahms:
Feldeinsamkeit Op 86 no 2
Nachtwandler Op 86 no 3
Es schauen die Blumen Op 96 no 3
Ständchen Op 106 no 1
Encore
Wolf:
An die Geliebte
Schubert:
L'incanto degli occhi D902/1
This recital was broadcast on BBC Radio 3 without the final encore
Click here for a personal review of this recital by Gwyneth Davies
To listen to the interview "Conversations with Artists: Simon Keenlyside"
Which took place in the Hawthornden Lecture Theatre, Edinburgh, on the same day (5.00pm), click below
http://www.eif.co.uk/E214_Conversations_with_Artists_Simon_Keenlyside.php
What the critics say
Rowena Smith for The Herald, 29 August 2006
http://www.theherald.co.uk/features/68943.html
Where in recital some singers reach out and perform to their audience, Simon Keenlyside lays bare his soul and invites the listener to make of it what they will. There is an almost painful shyness to his stage presence, an air of the little boy lost, which, so long as it doesn't seem disconcertingly awkward or offhand, brings with it an extremely touching and expressive sense of vulnerability.
It was Keenlyside at his best that the Edinburgh audience saw yesterday as he appeared at the Queen's Hall with regular recital partner Malcolm Martineau. What on the page appeared to be something of a pot pourri programme, the first half devoted to English song, the second to German Lied, turned out to be a work of art in itself; a varied series of songs whose overall effect was beautifully balanced and considered.
The opening sequence was a series of contrasts; Grainger's setting of the simple folksong, The Sprig of Thyme, followed by the exuberance of Bridge's Love Went a-Riding, with the sound of galloping wonderfully vivid in the piano accompaniment.
Martineau went straight from Holst's weirdly spare, disembodied song Betelgeuse to Britten's Songs and Proverbs of William Blake, in which Keenlyside and Martineau created colour and atmosphere that even its illustrious creators, Fischer-Dieskau and Britten, would have been hard-pressed to equal.
The sets of songs by Schubert and Brahms after the interval had again been chosen with expressive range in mind, from the dramatic intensity of Schubert's Im Wald and the fleeting humour of Fischerweise (fisherman's song) to the sweetness of Brahms's Standchen, with a beautifully touching whispered closing line.
The Scotsman, 29 August 2006
http://living.scotsman.com/music.cfm?id=1270592006
Four stars ****
“Simon Keenlyside has the Peter Pan looks, and, at times, vocal traces of a choirboy.”
“Keenlyside was in great form, despite recent back problems. His internal emotional narrative worked brilliantly, leaping directly from the eerie cosmic stasis of Holst's Betelgeuse to Britten's arresting settings of the Songs and Proverbs of William Blake Op22.
“In the second half, a false leap from Schubert's An Die Leier to the genial Fischerlied, as if omitting the Stimme Der Liebe, put a grin in his voice, as if it had been an intentional joke. Edinburgh loves Keenlyside and pianist Martineau, who played with relish.”
Tom Service for The Guardian, Wednesday August 30, 2006
http://arts.guardian.co.uk/reviews/story/0,,1860648,00.html
Keenlyside/Martineau | Bostridge/Pappano
Four stars (both performances)
Two great English singers, two outstanding pianists, and two strongly contrasting song recitals: baritone Simon Keenlyside and tenor Ian Bostridge dominated a day at the Edinburgh festival, and their approaches could not have been more different. Keenlyside Queen's Hall concert with pianist Malcolm Martineau began as a celebration of English song, a garland of pastoral numbers by Percy Grainger, Frank Bridge and Arthur Somervell. But Keenlyside invested these seemingly slight songs with emotional depth, nowhere more so than in Gustav Holst's Betelgeuse, a vision of life on a distant star, the music a haunting air from another planet.
But it was Keenlyside's and Martineau's performance of Britten's Songs and Proverbs of William Blake that was the highlight. This astonishing song cycle contains some of the bleakest music Britten ever wrote for voice, and Keenlyside made each proverb a stern admonishment, and each song a brilliantly characterised miniature, from the creepy musical onomatopoeia of The Fly to the epic energy of The Tyger. Everything Keenlyside does is instinctive and immediate, and to hear him sing Ev'ry Night and Ev'ry Morn, the final song in the cycle, was a shattering experience, as he communicated the emotional ambiguity with a startling directness.
It was another world from Ian Bostridge's programme with Antonio Pappano. Bostridge's intellectual acuity made for a sharply defined interpretation of songs from Schubert's Schwanengesang. He turned Spring Longing into a febrile psychodrama, and Far Away into a terrifying expression of loneliness and isolation. Where Keenlyside's performances expose his own personality, Bostridge's characters are externalised creations, as if added to the substance of Schubert's music. But it's an equally powerful approach, and Bostridge's performances of songs by Hugo Wolf were captivating.