Throughout history men have feared madwomen, burning them as witches, confining them in asylums and subjecting them to psychoanalysis – yet, they have also been fascinated, unable to resist fantasizing about them. For their new disc, Carolyn Sampson and Joseph Middleton have created a programme that explores the responses of a variety of composers to women whose stories have left them vulnerable and exposed. As a motto they have chosen an aphorism by Nietzsche: ‘There is always some madness in love, but there is also always some reason in madness'.

Brahms’s Ophelia Songs, composed for a stage production of Hamlet, appear next to those by Richard Strauss and Chausson, while Ophelia's death is described by both Schumann (in Herzeleid) and Saint-Saëns. Goethe’s mysterious and traumatized Mignon appears in settings by Hugo Wolf as well as Duparc, while his ill-used Gretchen grieves by her spinning-wheel in Schubert's matchless setting. Sadness and madness tip into witchery and unbridled eroticism with Pierre Louÿs's poems about Bilitis, set by Koechlin and Debussy. Sampson and Middleton end their recital as it began, with a suicide by drowning: in Poulenc’s monologue La Dame de Monte-Carlo, the elderly female protagonist has been unlucky at the gambling tables and decides to throw herself into the sea.

Sound/Video

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Brahms - Sie trugen ihn auf der Bahre bloss (unaccompanied)
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Schumann - Herzeleid, op.107 no.1
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Strauss, R - Drei Lieder der Ophelia, op.67: no.1
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Strauss, R - Drei Lieder der Ophelia, op.67: no.2
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Strauss, R - Drei Lieder der Ophelia, op.67: no.3
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Koechlin - Hymne a Asterte
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Debussy - Chansons de Bilitis - I. La Flute de Pan
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Debussy - Chansons de Bilitis - II. La Chevelure
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Debussy - Chansons de Bilitis - III. Le Tombeau des naiades
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Koechlin - Epitaphe de Bilitis
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Duparc - Romance de Mignon
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Wolf - Mignon Lieder: Kennst Du das Land
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Wolf - Mignon Lieder: Heib mich nicht reden
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Wolf - Mignon Lieder: Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt
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Wolf - Mignon Lieder: So lasst mich scheiden, bis ich werde
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Schubert - Gretchen am Spinnrade
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Brahms - Madchenlied, op.107 no.5
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Schumann - Die Spinnerin, op.107 no.5
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Saint-Saens- La mort d'Ophelie
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Chausson - Chansons d'Ophelie
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Brahms - 5 Ophelia Lieder, WoO22
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Duparc - Au pays ou se fait la guerre
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Poulenc - La Dame de Monte-Carlo

Europadisc Review

The great thing about song recitals is that, for imaginative performers, they offer seemingly limitless thematic possibilities. For their latest disc on the BIS label, soprano Carolyn Sampson and pianist Joseph Middleton have come up with a fascinating selection of works around the central theme of female madness, drawing primarily on literary models from Shakespeare (Ophelia in Hamlet), Goethe (the androgynous Mignon from the Wilhelm Meister novels) and Pierre Louÿs’s famous Sappho-hoax The Songs of Bilitis. Musically, the settings range from 19th-century German Romanticism to 20th-century France. Reams have been written (and will continue to be) on the thorny subject of male perceptions of female madness, but among the many great strengths of this disc is that its thoughtful programme offers a feast for the ear as well as food for thought, and doesn’t get preachy with any hidden agendas. Sampson and Middleton’s vivid performances, constantly alive to text and emotions, are enough in themselves to nourish the listener’s own reflections.

Pride of place goes to three collections in particular: Debussy’s sensually-charged Chansons de Bilitis (1897-98), the four unsettling Mignon-Lieder from Hugo Wolf’s Goethe-Lieder of a decade earlier, and Richard Strauss’s three astonishingly atmospheric Lieder der Ophelia (1918). Whether singing in French or German, Carolyn Sampson projects the texts with seeming effortlessness, making each song easy to follow, while combining radiance, passion and focus in ideal measure. What makes these performances really extraordinary, however, is the context in which these famous sets are placed. Thus, Strauss’s Ophelia songs are preceded by Schumann’s setting of a German paraphrase of Queen Gertrude’s lament for Ophelia, Herzeleid, op.107 no.1, itself introduced by the album’s opening track, Brahms’s brief, simple ‘Sie trugen ihn auf der Bahre bloß’ from his 5 Ophelia-Lieder, WoO 22, sung unaccompanied to really focus both mind and ear.

Debussy’s Bilitis songs are framed by Charles Koechlin’s brilliant Hymne à Astarté (Astarte was the goddess of sex, fertility and war: an unnerving combination) and Épitaphe de Bilitis, while Wolf’s Mignon-Lieder are introduced by Henri Duparc’s ecstatic Romance de Mignon (a French translation by Victor Wilder of ‘Kennst du das Land’, which follows immediately), and succeeded by another Goethe heroine, Gretchen from Faust in Schubert’s timeless masterpiece Gretchen am Spinnrade, D118. The ‘spinning’ theme is then followed up in two contrasting settings of a Paul Heyse poem, Brahms’s Mädchenlied, op.107 no.5, and Schumann’s Die Spinnerin, op.107 no.4 (the identical opus numbers are coincidental).

Ophelia returns in Saint-Saëns’s dizzyingly swirling La mort d’Ophélie, Chausson’s desolate Chanson d’Ophélie and Brahms’s achingly simple Ophelia-Lieder, now heard complete and accompanied (and lasting all of four minutes). The recital closes with two standalone songs, Duparc’s mournful Au pays où se fait la guerre (1869) to a text by Théophile Gautier in which a girl mourns her lover gone to war, and Francis Poulenc’s almost operatic La Dame de Monte-Carlo (1961), a setting of Cocteau depicting an elderly woman driven to suicide by her gambling addiction.

From first note to last, Sampson doesn’t put a foot wrong, and she’s aided by supremely responsive and sensitive accompaniments from Middleton. She must also be applauded for posing for half an hour in a cold pond for the arresting, Ophelia-inspired cover image! Intelligent notes by Natasha Loges (helpfully following the exact running order) and BIS’s demonstration-quality recording in Potton Hall, Suffolk, set the seal on a remarkably rewarding and thought-provoking disc, which no lover of art song will want to be without.

Reviews

Soprano Carolyn Sampson poses Ophelia-style on the cover of Reason in Madness, her new disc with pianist Joseph Middleton, a brilliantly assembled exploration of how female madness has fascinated male poets and composers. ... all performed with Sampson’s wonted freshness of tone, superb control and subtle sensuality, with Middleton offering vibrant support. Fiona Maddocks

The Guardian 4 April 2019