The Spin Doctor Europadisc's Weekly Column

25 January is marked around the world as a celebration of the life and work of Scotland’s national poet, Robert Burns. For those preparing a Burns Supper, several ingredients are necessary, and by now many of you will already have prepared the Cullen skink, the haggis with neeps and tatties, and even (for those with large appetites) cranachan – Scotland’s answer to Eton mess. Also essential is a generous serving of Burns’s own poetry, not least the Address to a Haggis, as well as the Selkirk Grace (‘Some hae meat an canna eat...’). More formal gatherings will involve the participation of a bagpiper to pipe in the guests.

For those celebrating Burns Night less formally, however, the musical options are varied. Burns’s poetry, as published in his lifetime by James Johnson and George Thomson, became inextricably linked with many traditional or traditional-style Scottish tunes, and these are often presented in modern folk style on recordings such as the ambitious Complete Songs series on the Linn label (currently volumes 3-5, 7-9 and 11 are still available). However, notwithstanding his humble origins, Burns’s dates (1759–1796) and what we know of his milieu following his move to Edinburgh in 1786 suggest a performing style more in the classical mould, with fiddle and harpsichord or fortepiano as accompaniment. This is certainly supported by some of the earlier posthumous settings of his texts by no less a figure than Ludwig van Beethoven: four of the 25 Scottish Songs, op.108, published by Thomson in Edinburgh in 1818, are to Burns texts, including ‘The Lovely Lass of Inverness’, while the 12 Scottish Songs, WoO156, include a distinctly parlour-style version for three voices of ‘Auld Lang Syne’.

Although Burns’s younger contemporary Walter Scott was to fire up the imagination of Romantic-era composers in more high-profile ways (particularly in the overtures of Berlioz and the operas of Donizetti), several notable settings of the older poet’s verses date from this period, including eight of the songs in Robert Schumann’s collection Myrthen, op.25 (in Wilhelm Gerhard’s German reworkings), as well as the same composer’s 5 Lieder, op.55, for mixed choir. And it was at Schumann’s suggestion that his wife Clara set ‘Am Strande’ (another of Gerhard's Burns translations, this time of ‘Musing on the Roaring Ocean’).

As the archetypal Scottish bard, Burns has made it into more broadly-themed collections of songs from various countries. The fifth of Maurice Ravel’s Chants populaires is the Chanson écossaise, a setting of ‘Ye banks and braes o' bonnie Doon’ whose accompaniment manages to fuse bagpipe-like drones and inflections with textures of Impressionistic delicacy. But surely among the most unexpected Burns settings are those made by 20th-century Russian composers: the suppression of many native Soviet poets meant that approved texts concentrated on ‘people’s poets’ of other eras and nations. Burns’s lowly farming background and early years as a labourer combined with his very direct literary appeal proved a perfect combination for composers including Shostakovich, Khrennikov, Denisov and Sviridov (see Toccata Classics’ fascinating Russian Settings of Robert Burns, TOCC0039).

For those wanting something a little closer to Burns’s Scottish roots, the University of Aberdeen Chamber Choir’s Immortal Memory (Vox Regis VXR0003) contains a variety of choral settings of many a Burns Night classic, including ‘To a Haggis’, ‘To a Mouse’, ‘Ca’ the Yowes’ and ‘A Man’s a Man’. And for a taste of old Edinburgh, Delphian’s Within a mile of Edinburgh (DCD34005), featuring fortepianist John Kitchen and baritone Malcolm Green, combines several Burns songs with matching piano variations from the era by composers including JC Bach, Domenico Corri and JL Dussek. With so much variety to choose from, there’s no excuse not to celebrate Robert Burns’s genius in high style, whatever your musical taste.


On a more sombre note, the death has been announced of the distinguished British early music tenor Nigel Rogers at the age of 86. Born in Wellington, Shropshire, on 21 March 1935, following studies under Boris Ord at King’s College, Cambridge, where he sang in the Choir, he undertook further training in Italy and then Munich, where he was a founder member of Thomas Binkley’s Studio der Frühen Musik. This set him on the course of specialisation in early music, most notably in the Italian and English repertoires of the early Baroque period. His first recording of what would become one of his signature roles, Orfeo in Monteverdi’s eponymous opera, was on the 1974 Archiv Produktion set conducted by Jürgen Jürgens (for whom he had already appeared on a disc of the composer’s madrigals).

As well as appearing on discs of Carissimi and Caccini, and Harnoncourt’s first recording of Bach’s St Matthew Passion, he recorded English repertoire from Dowland, Henry Lawes, Matthew Locke, John Blow and Purcell, with his accounts of Dowland’s lute songs being particularly admired. With his own Chiaroscuro Ensemble his recordings reached as far back as Dufay (a notable recording of the Missa ‘Se la face ay pale’). But it was for his accounts of Monteverdi and other Italian madrigalists that he was especially famed, as numerous recordings (many currently out of the catalogue) testify. He appeared on Andrew Parrott’s pioneering recreation of the 1589 Florentine Medici ‘Stravaganza’ (also filmed), and in Monteverdi’s Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda for Reinhard Goebel.

The summit of Rogers’s art on disc can be heard on Dowland’s lute songs in partnership with lutenists Anthony Bailes and Paul O’Dette and gambist Jordi Savall (Veritas x2: 9029532055), and above all in his second recording of Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo with London Baroque and Charles Medlam (currently unavailable), where his command of period ornamentation, particularly the elusive trilli in the great aria ‘Possente spirto’, proved hugely influential on following generations of singers. Rogers was one of the first modern performers to master period techniques in early Italian Baroque music. His pioneering contributions to our present understanding of this period cannot be overestimated.