Review Details
MUSIC IN THE UNIVERSITY JEREMY HUW WILLIAMS Baritone ROGER B. WILLIAMS Piano
Alan Cooper
10 December 2009
COWDRAY HALL
Having greatly enjoyed hearing Jeremy Huw Williams as soloist in the Bach Choir’s performance of John McLeod’s The Chronicle of St. Machar and remembering too his previous recital with Roger Williams in April 2008, it was a pleasure to welcome him back again to the Cowdray Hall. One of the most beautiful song cycles of the Romantic Era, Schumann’s Dichterliebe was to be followed by Butterworth’s A Shropshire Lad and a new piece by John McLeod, The White Flame, then to finish, Welsh and Scottish folk song arrangements by Joseph Haydn.
Some of German Lieder’s “Greatest Hits” are to be found among the sixteen songs of Dichterliebe with words by Heinrich Heine. In wunderschönen Monat Mai; Die Rose, die Lilie, die Taube, Die Sonne; Ich grolle nicht are just three wonderful songs that often appear on their own in a mixed recital but Jeremy Huw Williams wove them all together with the others in a non stop performance that perfectly reflected all the changes of mood that Schumann has written into his cycle. If you have ever stood on a Scottish hillside in summer and looked down into a valley as sunshine, rain storms and shadows of clouds sweep across the fields, this was like Jeremy Huw Williams’s performance of Dichterliebe as his singing brought smiles, sadness, warmth and even anger to the appropriate songs turning the whole performance into a kind of one man opera. No, that is not true. It was a two man opera because Roger Williams reflected and amplified all the songs with his most beautifully coloured and carefully manicured piano playing.
There was more drama of a different kind after the interval in Butterworth’s settings of six poems from A. E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad. There is a terrible kind of poignancy in these songs many of which deal with the deaths of young men going to war when we remember that Butterworth himself died during the Battle of the Somme. Even the first song which deals with something as seemingly innocent as cherry blossom still points naggingly toward the impermanence of human life. The tragic back message of The lads in their hundreds, led to Jeremy Huw Williams’s wonderfully dramatic performance of Is my team ploughing, which has an amazing sting in the tail. This could almost be humorous if it were not for the ominous bass note played so portentously by Roger Williams at the end of the song.
John McLeod’s three songs with words by J. B. Priestley were the perfect follow on from the Butterworth songs. The Treasure takes the same sideways look at the impermanence of human life as Loveliest of Trees before the amazingly powerful and astonishing song, The Dream of the Birds crashes headlong into the same idea. The Farewell has music of a quite different sort from Mahler but the words reminded me of Der Abscheid, the final song from his symphonic song cycle Das Lied von der Erde. McLeod’s was a forceful and electrifying work which was given a startlingly powerful performance by Jeremy Huw Williams.
The two Welsh and one Scottish song settings by Haydn diffused the tension nicely and the encore, Purcell’s Music for a While was the perfect conclusion to another fine recital from those fabulous Williams boys.