REVIEW: Martin Dreyer’s verdict on Brahms and the Schumanns, Sir Jack Lyons Concert Hall, University of York, March 5

Fenella Humphreys, violin, Martin Roscoe, piano, Ben Goldscheider,  horn, and Jess Dandy,  contralto

THIS was two recitals in one. It began and ended with three instrumental works, one each from Robert and Clara Schumann at the start, with the Brahms Horn Trio to finish.

In between we had a song recital from contralto Jess Dandy, with Martin Roscoe as her ‘collaborative pianist’ (we are no longer allowed to speak of accompanists, such is the woke world we live in). Indeed, he was omnipresent and vivid throughout the evening.

Ben Goldscheider’s horn was in pretty good form for Robert’s Adagio and Allegro, Op 70, if not quite at the peak he reached later. One top note even went astray, but he bounced back quickly. His legato was marvellously smooth in the Adagio. One had to smile at the ducking and diving between him and Roscoe in the Allegro, which maintained a tactically immaculate blend.

Less extrovert were the Three Romances, Op 20 for violin and piano by Clara. Fenella Humphreys wisely kept her violin intimate in the opening Andante in D flat major but without compromising her naturally rich tone. The ebb and flow with Roscoe in the finale was a delight. Clara may not have been as persuasive a melodist as her husband, but she knew how to balance these instruments.

Goldscheider was back to join Humphreys for the Horn Trio in E flat at the close. He despatched it with the panache of the super-confident. But Humphreys matched him stride for stride and their balance in the opening movement’s dialogue was impeccable. Goldscheider found a lovely pianissimo for the return of the first theme.

A smoothly elegiac trio allied to a perky scherzo prepared us for penetrating the Adagio’s darker moments. But the rondo was altogether light-hearted, gambolling through its episodes with gay abandon.

Roscoe was the mastermind behind this trio’s cohesion. The best was certainly kept until last. Jess Dandy is a fine talent and as a true contralto she is a rare bird, one to be carefully nurtured.

She is not quite the finished article, however. It took her until her very last song, Schumann’s Requiem, the last of his Op 90 settings, to produce a real pianissimo. Until that point, she had stuck to a stolid mezzo forte or more with little variation in tone. It was as if she had been casting around for a focus.

With a little more confidence she could stop worrying about delivering a beautiful sound – she already has that – and concentrate on interpreting the poetry (but not by shaking her head for emphasis as much as she does).

There was still a great deal to enjoy in what she offered. She glowed at the top of Clara’s setting of Heine’s Ich stand in dunkeln Träumen (I Stood Darkly Dreaming) over Roscoe’s richly flowing accompaniment and found a nicely contemplative mood for Robert’s Stille Tränen (Silent Tears), which was complemented by an exquisite postlude.

She and Humphreys (now on viola) had blended well in Brahms’s Two Songs Op 90, where they and Roscoe negotiated the tempo-changes with pleasing dexterity.

Review by Martin Dreyer

REVIEW: Martin Dreyer’s verdict on Leeds Lieder Festival: Day 2

Jess Dandy: “That endangered species, a true contralto”

Jess Dandy/Martin Roscoe & Robin Tritschler/Christopher Glynn, Howard Assembly Room, Leeds, April 29

THOSE of us who had not encountered Jess Dandy before, your correspondent included, cannot have avoided reading that she had been likened to Kathleen Ferrier in a national newspaper.

It is an unfortunate comparison and should be dropped before it becomes burdensome. She is indeed that endangered species, a true contralto, which alone entitles her to our attention. She may in time become the one and only Jess Dandy – but she is not Ferrier.

I confess that what initially drew my attention was her accompanist: Martin Roscoe is a supreme musician and a very busy one. Anyone who claims his time deserves our respect, especially since he is most often found as a solo performer.

With that rant out of the way, we may concentrate on Dandy’s lunchtime programme, which opened with Amy Beach and Lili Boulanger before moving onto more familiar territory with Falla, Wolf and Tchaikovsky, each of her five groups therefore in a different language.

Oddly enough, her diction in Beach’s three Robert Browning songs was almost consonant-free, but her tone was richly textured which excited anticipation.

Martin Roscoe: “Supreme musician and a very busy one”

In four unrelated songs by Boulanger, three from her teenage years, she penetrated the surface better. In two Maeterlinck poems, her high ending to ‘Reflets’, finding consolation in the moon, was beautifully controlled and the illusory ‘Attente’ (Waiting) was properly bleak. The prospect of Ulysses’s return to Ithaca brought compensatory joy to her tone.

Falla’s settings of seven traditional Spanish folksongs generally needed a lighter touch to match Roscoe’s impeccable staccatos. These works look easier on paper than they really are.

It was only when Dandy came to Wolf’s Mörike settings (1888) that her diction really began to shine. ‘Er ist’s’ (Spring Is Here) was wonderfully ecstatic, rounded off by the piano’s peerless postlude. She had a real feel for the bitter-sweet ‘Verborgenheit’ (Seclusion) and danced nimbly as the water-sprite Reedfoot alongside the piano’s curlicues. Both performers revelled in the dramatic possibilities of ‘Der Feuerreiter’ (The Fire-rider), while ending peacefully.

Dandy was equally well-suited to four Tchaikovsky songs. Voice and piano neatly intertwined in a Tolstoy poem about spring. There was a wonderfully pained melisma at the end of ‘I was a little blade of grass’ (the girl had been married off against her will). Even if the final climax of ‘Can it be day?’ was not quite full enough, we knew she had these songs in her bloodstream; Roscoe’s postlude was another little masterpiece.

This young lady certainly has talent. She can now afford to be less concerned about delivering perfect tone and concentrate more on acting with her voice.

Robin Tritschler: “Particularly satisfying occasion”

The second evening supplied my fourth recital of the festival. But it was the first in which the singer used no music. Thirty years ago, this would not have been a cause for comment. But times have changed and musicians are no longer routinely learning their scores by heart. One might have thought that during the ‘downtime’ provided by the pandemic, this might have changed. But no.

The hero in question was tenor Robin Tritschler, whose first half – ‘Illuminated Music’ – was English, Britten’s own works framing his realisations of Croft and Purcell. After half-time, we had ‘Illuminating Songs’ from further afield, eight composers stretching from Schubert to Henry Mancini. His admirable partner was Christopher Glynn.

Coloratura flowed easily in ‘Let The Florid Music Praise’ (On This Island) and Croft’s A Hymn To Divine Musick turned the temperature up further. All his Purcell set was characterised by a focus and intensity that was communicated all the more directly by the absence of a music-stand between audience and singer.

‘Music For A While’ enjoyed crispness in both voice and piano, which spilled over strongly into the finish of ‘Sweeter Than Roses’. The darting sections and crazy swings of ‘Mad Bess’ were finely wrought, with Glynn injecting just the right level of fire without dominating.

Christopher Glynn: “Injecting just the right level of fire without dominating “. Picture: Gerard Collett

Britten’s Canticle I: My Beloved Is Mine was hugely convincing, a tenderly felt duet that did full justice to Quarles’s spiritual paraphrase from the Song Of Solomon. Glynn’s flowing piano alongside Tritchler’s vocal freedom came to a close of the utmost serenity.

Moonlight suffused virtually all the second half. The atmosphere was movingly set by Schubert’s incomparable setting of Leitner’s ‘Der Winterabend’: the piano’s seamless line matched the tenor’s legato.

Fauré’s ‘Clair de Lune’ conjured intimacy while Hahn’s ‘L’heure Exquise’ delivered perfumed scents. Mancini’s nostalgic ‘Moon River’, with its Beethovenian opening was nicely balanced by Howells’s setting of De la Mare’s ‘Full Moon’, which disappeared into a niente finish.

Tritschler really opened out in the climactic moments of Liza Lehmann’s ‘Ah, Moon Of My Delight’ (In A Persian Garden), after which Coleridge-Taylor’s ‘Big Lady Moon’ made the perfect encore. This was a particularly satisfying occasion, with both musicians on excellent form.

Review by Martin Dreyer