Preview: Slavonic Songs

 ST MICHAEL’S CHURCH, 1, SLATEFORD ROAD, EDINBURGH EH11 1NX, 12/4/2025, 7.30pm

 A CONCERT OF EASTERN EUROPEAN MASTERPIECES

BY MUSSORGSKY AND DVOŘÁK

 CAROLINE TAYLOR   &   BRIAN BANNATYNE-SCOTT

(SOPRANO)                               (BASS) 

 DEREK CLARK (PIANO)

 Free Entry with retiring collection

After the success of Schubert’s Winterreise last year, Derek Clark and I decided to explore some of the rich repertoire of Eastern Europe for this year’s spring recital and have come up with a programme of perhaps unfamiliar music which we feel ought to be better known.

I had the privilege of working closely with one of Russia’s greatest singers in my younger days, when I studied with Galina Vishnevskaya at the Britten/Pears School in Aldeburgh. We worked extensively on Mussorgsky’s ‘Songs and Dances of Death’, and latterly on his lesser known cycle, Sunless, and it is this melancholy set of songs that starts our recital on Saturday.

I am joined by the fantastic young soprano, Caroline Taylor, a brilliant alumna of St Andrews University, who is fast establishing herself as a top recitalist in England. Caroline will sing Mussorgsky’s charming and witty ‘Detskaya’ (The Nursery), a set of songs drawing on the experience of the composer’s childhood, deep in rural Russia.

After the interval, Caroline will sing three gorgeous songs by Claude Debussy, and I will round the evening off with Dvořák’s utterly beautiful Biblical Songs, Czech renditions of some of the Psalms of David. The composer wrote these songs in 1894, when he was living in New York, and they are deeply infused with nostalgia for his homeland in Bohemia.

We are delighted to be accompanied by the excellent Derek Clark, formerly Head of Music at Scottish Opera.

 Please come along to the lovely St Michael’s Church in Slateford Road in Edinburgh on Saturday evening, 12th April, at 7.30pm. I can promise you a special treat! 

Photo credit: Victoria Cadisch