Birdsong: Songs by Brahms, Schumann & Beamish

Roderick Williams (baritone), Andrew West (piano)

The catalyst for this latest song recital from baritone Roderick Williams was a flat refusal. ‘Many years ago’ one of his song choices for a Lieder competition was refused on the grounds that it was ‘a woman’s song’. Despite being made to feel ‘foolish and ignorant’ at the time, Williams later started to question why so much of the song repertoire is considered gender-specific: many of the most celebrated cycles by Schubert, Schumann, Vaughan Williams and others are considered ‘men’s songs’ (Winterreise, Die schone Müllerin, Songs of Travel...), and thus effectively off-limits to women singers. But such restrictions cut performers off from vast swathes of the repertoire. Why shouldn’t singers of whatever gender perform songs that grab them musically and emotionally? Put more bluntly, does the singer’s gender always have to match that of the song-text’s persona, or be allowed to determine what repertoire they engage with?

With this recording, Williams and his accompanist Andrew West set out to challenge notions of gender exclusivity. They perform many numbers that are traditionally regarded as ‘women’s songs’ despite the fact that the women’s ‘voices’ contained therein are all the work of male poets and in most cases male composers projecting their own idealised (and often unashamedly patriarchal) imaginings of the female psyche.

Another theme running through the disc (hence its title) is the use of animal imagery – mainly birds – as metaphors for emotion or for characters in the songs: here we get a cluster (though not quite a ‘watch’) of nightingales, a swallow, an exotic peacock and hoopoe, a salamander and a fish. All this imagery is conveyed with verve, subtlety and great sensitivity by Williams and West.

A selection of nine Brahms songs, performed in three groups of three, forms the backbone of their programme, opening with An die Nachtigall, whose pellucid accompaniment and gentle yet rapt vocal tones set the tone for the disc, while the intensification of expression in the second stanza is subtle but palpable. In Mädchenlied, the piano gently suggests the turning of spinning wheels, and the increasingly anxious atmosphere is vividly conveyed by Williams. There’s an engaging spring to the step in Das Mädchen with its two-sided glimpse into a girl’s future, one fearful, the other joyful, as she gazes at her reflection.

In Clara Schumann’s glorious setting of Liebst du um Schönheit by Friedrich Rückert, it’s easy to sink luxuriantly into the raptly woven harmonies, but Williams and West keep the music poised and flowing, right up to the lovely little postlude. The second Brahms group opens with Das Mädchen spricht, with its suggestion of both the twittering of swallows and the special joy of seeing them. Salamander was disliked by Brahms’s close friend Elisabeth von Herzogenberg, probably because of the quintessentially Brahmsian dark humour which the performers bring out in this deliciously pointed account. Much more to Herzogenberg’s liking was Nachtigall which, she noted, ‘has the bittersweet quality of the real nightingale’s song: they seem to revel in augmented and diminished intervals, passionate creatures that they are!’ It receives a magical performance here, and makes for a perfect segue into Sally Beamish’s Four Songs of Hafez (2007), which opens with ‘Nightingale’, where the bird sings in the same upper range touched on fleetingly by Brahms’s nightingale.

Beamish takes her texts from Glasgow-based Jila Peacock’s translations of a selection of the 14th-century Persian poet Hafez’s works, each of which employs bird or animal imagery to explore the longing for ‘the Beloved’. In their original published form Peacock accompanied each translation with the Persian text drawn in exquisitely-rendered calligraphy that matches the shape of the animal in the poem. And Beamish achieves something similar in her settings: the nightingale’s forlorn call dominates the opening song, while the falling motifs of the darkly intense second song, ‘Peacock’, suggest not just the bird ‘falling into paradise’ but also its long, cascading tail feathers. The third song, ‘Fish’, is lighter in tone, an elevated drinking song whose lively accompaniment  evokes the lively movements of a fish in clear waters. ‘Hoopoe’ makes a marvellously haunting conclusion, in which the onomatopoeically-derived name of this exotically-crested, long-billed bird becomes a repeated motif.

Brahms’s Vergebliches Ständchen returns the listener to the 19th century with a jolt in a joyously sparkling performance, while Sapphische Ode (the song that Williams was refused permission to perform in competition) receives a loving performance that silences all criticism, relishing the words and broad, expressive lines (and what do competition adjudicators know, anyway?). An intensely atmospheric account of Von ewiger Liebe rounds off the set on a highpoint, the performers’ expressive commitment encompassing both the fine detail and the generous sweep of the music.

Finally comes a real test of Williams’s main thesis in this recital: Robert Schumann’s Frauenliebe und -leben, in what appears to be the first ever recording of this celebrated song-cycle about ‘A Woman’s Love and Life’). Encompassing both the hopes and ecstasies of youthful passion and the tenderness and cares of adulthood, this performance succeeds in large part because of the light, airy quality of Williams’s baritone, agile enough to respond to the nuances of both text and music. The hesitancy of ‘Seit ich ihn gesehen’ and the elation of ‘Er, der Herrlichste von allen’ are, against all expectation, caught to perfection, and West’s accompaniments are wonderfully attentive. ‘Du Ring am meinem Finger’ may throw the listener a little, mainly because of where the vocal line lies in relation to the piano part, but it builds to a splendid climax. ‘Süsser Freund’ has an unmistakably Schumannesque tenderness to it, and the final two songs, in performances that combine emotional directness with underlying tenderness, are remarkably convincing.

With the Schumann and Beamish cycles in particular, but also with the riches disclosed in the Brahms songs, we have yet another reminder that Williams is among today’s greatest exponents of song, served well here by a beautifully warm recording. This is an album that challenges and confounds long-held preconceptions about the very nature of performance in this repertoire. For that reason alone, it deserves to be heard by all lovers of art song.