ART Sung, created by pianist Elizabeth Mucha, is a variable group that unites song and narrative.
In this incarnation, they were two singers, two pianists, a dancer and a videographer, all focused on the life of Edith Sitwell, Behind Her Façade – who can lay claim to be Scarborough’s most famous daughter.
Young William Walton – “Willy” as she called him – knew the Sitwell family better than most, having encountered them at Oxford and lodged with them in London for more than a decade.
His decision to set Edith’s Façade poems thrust him onto the musical map; its success can be said to have benefited her equally. Neither looked back thereafter and, by the time of her death in 1964, she had become the grande dame of English poetry.
Art Sung made numbers from Façade the backbone of its exploration of Sitwell’s life, with mezzo Lucy Stevens inhabiting the role to her fingertips, dressed all in black, including gloves and turban-style hat.
Realism was enhanced with the very curtain used in the work’s 1923 premiere, from behind which she had projected her poetry through a megaphone. James Symonds contrived a video backdrop here with animated sketches intensifying her reminiscences.
During a potpourri of some 30 items, other composers had a welcome look-in. There was a surprising song from Michael Head, The King O China’s Daughter’ and two Ned Rorem settings of Sitwell too.
Two settings of Olivia Diamond’s Sitwell-related poetry by Hayley Jenkins made an impact, the one with exciting speech-song, the other involving tenor Michael Gibson in a solemn line, which he controlled smoothly.
He also offered an all-too-brief extract from Still Falls The Rain, Sitwell’s meditation on the raids of 1940, which Britten set as his Canticle III. It deserved more, but since this was mainly a frolic it may not have seemed to fit.
An opportunity was certainly missed to look into The Heart Of The Matter, a Sitwell programme devised especially for the Aldeburgh Festival in 1956, with Britten’s music.
Three extracts from Satie’s ballet Parade, played with considerable panache by pianists Elizabeth Mucha and Nigel Foster, either or both of whom were present throughout the evening, offered an opportunity for dancer Roxani Eleni Garefalaki to evoke the spirit that led to the Roaring Twenties. She reappeared in a fragment from West Side Story, recalling Sitwell’s visit to the USA.
A Joseph Horovitz setting of Out, Out Damned Spot (Macbeth) near the end accurately encapsulated the mixture of enthusiasm and derangement that Stevens had so vividly painted in this wide-ranging programme.
Review by Martin Dreyer