RODERICK WILLIAMS (baritone)
IAIN BURNSIDE (piano)
Sunday 15 March 2020 at 4.00pm
IAIN BURNSIDE (piano)
Sunday 15 March 2020 at 4.00pm
Roderick Williams is one of this country’s finest and most popular singers. Born in North London in 1965, he was a choral scholar at Magdalen College, Oxford before becoming a music teacher. At 26, he resumed his music studies at Guildhall School of Music and Drama. He first appeared at the BBC Proms in 1996 and has since established himself as a Proms regular, culminating in his appearance at the Last Night in 2014. He was acclaimed as Singer of the Year by Royal Philharmonic Society in 2016 and in 2017 was awarded the OBE for services to music.
Iain Burnside studied at Merton College, Oxford, Royal Academy of Music and the Chopin Academy in Warsaw. He specialises in the song repertoire, and as presenter of Cardiff Singer of the Year on TV, he has done much to bring the joys of vocal music and it’s performance to a nationwide audience.
Iain Burnside studied at Merton College, Oxford, Royal Academy of Music and the Chopin Academy in Warsaw. He specialises in the song repertoire, and as presenter of Cardiff Singer of the Year on TV, he has done much to bring the joys of vocal music and it’s performance to a nationwide audience.
Schubert: ‘Winter Journey’
Schubert’s song-cycle ‘Winterreise’ D.911 will be sung in a new translation by Jeremy Sams.
This translation was commissioned by pianist Christopher Glynn, Artistic Director of Ryedale Festival, and was first performed at the Festival in July 2016. Introducing it, Glynn wrote: ‘We hope this ‘Winter Journey’ can offer English-speaking listeners a way to experience the story’s sense with something of the same directness that Schubert surely intended when he sat down at the piano in 1827 and sang these songs for the first time to his friends’.
‘Winterreise’ is one of the great song cycles, forming a challenge to singers of all voices. The poems by Schubert’s contemporary Wilhelm Muller tell the story of a spurned lover who travels from his beloved’s house out into the wintry and barren landscape, a searing and remorseless journey.
Please note that there will not be an interval.
This translation was commissioned by pianist Christopher Glynn, Artistic Director of Ryedale Festival, and was first performed at the Festival in July 2016. Introducing it, Glynn wrote: ‘We hope this ‘Winter Journey’ can offer English-speaking listeners a way to experience the story’s sense with something of the same directness that Schubert surely intended when he sat down at the piano in 1827 and sang these songs for the first time to his friends’.
‘Winterreise’ is one of the great song cycles, forming a challenge to singers of all voices. The poems by Schubert’s contemporary Wilhelm Muller tell the story of a spurned lover who travels from his beloved’s house out into the wintry and barren landscape, a searing and remorseless journey.
Please note that there will not be an interval.
Review by Dr Jonathan Tyack
Roderick Williams promised a Winterreise with barriers removed. With new listeners in mind, the English translation by Jeremy Sams was written in straightforward language. This, Williams said, opened space within the story for each listener’s imagination to get to work. Speaking to several new listeners afterwards, they found the combination of accessible text and powerful musicianship as spellbinding as those intimately familiar with the music. As singer and actor in equal parts, Williams spun the 24 songs of the cycle together into an agonising depiction of emotional and mental collapse.
Schubert’s music in Winterreise fluctuates again and again from light to dark (only rarely the other way round). Williams brought delicious sweetness to the lighter moments, only to shade his delivery each time as the music and the mood darkened. Loud flurries of rage were followed time and time again by a withdrawal into an interior tone of voice signalling resignation.
This economy of vocal delivery was matched by Williams’s control of facial gesture. A vacant glance at the floor opened the cycle, recurring with the persistence of depression between each song, holding the silence. To look up from the audience at the vocal entries was to find Williams staring hard-eyed directly at you, or so it seemed, making the relentless portrayal of rejection inescapable.
Ian Burnside matched this intensity by providing an underscoring at times icy, at times turbulent, but always locked in recitative-like synchronicity with the singer. Burnside was also the foil for an understated coup de théâtre for the final song. Moving around to the foot of the piano, Williams sung directly to him, casting him as the hurdy-gurdy man who, alone in this darkest of cycles, offers our protagonist some thin solace.