A Singer’s Guide to Programming a Recital Pt2
The ideal recital length, with interval, is about one and a half hours, say 40 minutes in the first half, 15 minutes break and then about 30 minutes in the second half. Unless I have a theme of one or two composers, I like to have a mixture of languages and styles, although not too diverse. Unless you are singing a celebrity recital or a promotional concert, it is never wise to mix genres. Don’t throw art songs and opera arias together, and don’t mix serious songs with songs from the shows, unless you have a clear purpose.
As a dark male voice, there is an unfortunate lack of variety available to you in terms of repertoire. Light frivolous songs for bass are hard to find, especially in the classic 19th century repertoire, so it is always worth looking more closely at the 20th and 21st century. On the other hand, unless you are preparing a programme for a particularly esoteric audience, no-one will thank you for too much avant garde and atonal music. As I said above, a song recital is hard to sell to the public at the best of times, and although a certain amount of challenge is acceptable too much modernity will drive away most audiences.
It is always important to start with some excitement, to grab your listener’s attention, so one of your first group of songs should shake things up somewhat. I made a slight mistake last year in my Edinburgh Festival recital, by programming two really beautiful, but also rather quiet, songs by Schubert at the beginning. As one reviewer wrote, he was not sure whether I had lost my voice at the start, and you really don’t want the listener to be uncomfortable! Therefore, it is worth making sure that either the first or second song shows your voice and artistry off to full advantage. I always tell my students that first impressions are hugely important whenever you are singing. It doesn’t need to be terribly loud, although that often helps, but you need to grasp the audience by the scruff of the neck, and show them that a) you are in control and b) that they can sit back and enjoy your performance, happy in the knowledge that you are really good, and that they are in for a treat!
Having established your credentials at the beginning, I would suggest breaking the recital down into components. The first group is to establish the voice quality and general air of competence. Then a contrasting group of songs, perhaps in a different language, to give variety and to show your versatility, and then perhaps leading up to the interval, a more extended group of songs, either a medium length cycle, or a properly mixed selection, ideally all by the same composer.
After the break, when of course, if you have made some recordings, you get your family members to sell CDs to give your audience a souvenir of the concert, I like to start again with a group of three songs, perhaps again in a different language, and then I programme what I consider the centrepiece of the recital, a good chunk of about twenty minutes, either of one composer, one theme or one unified cycle. This is the section which defines the recital, and which provides the talking point of discussion after the show.
In no special order, here are some of the groups I have found to be successful recital repertoire for my voice category. In French, I love the little cycle by Poulenc, ‘Le Bestiaire’, a selection of very short poems by Apollinaire, combining wit with satire, humour with melancholy. There are two fantastic sets of songs about Don Quichotte, one by Ravel and one by Jacques Ibert, demonstrating once again that the best composers of Spanish music are often French. Unless you have them transposed, the Ravel are slightly too high for a bass. I have never sung them for that reason, but for any reasonable baritone, they are a superb option. The Ibert group was written for the great Russian bass, Feodor Chaliapin, for a film by Pabst in 1933. In particular, the fourth and last song, ‘La Mort de Don Quichotte’ is terrific, full of Spanish sadness. You can find me singing it on YouTube. There is a truly weird recording of Chaliapin singing the songs, accompanied by Ibert himself, which takes the notion of self-indulgence to a level I didn’t imagine possible!
Mussorgsky wrote two cycles which are of particular interest to basses, ‘Sunless’ and ‘The Songs and Dances of Death’. Both are outstanding. ‘Sunless’ is less well known but extremely rewarding, while the Death songs, four allegories of the triumph of Death over mankind, are simply some of the greatest songs ever written, each one a miniature opera in scope. There is plenty of room for quite dramatic interpretation, but you need a decent grasp of Russian to bring them off, and the final song, imagining Death as a triumphant commander in chief on a bloody battlefield, is technically challenging, with lots of big high E flats to test both stamina and tessitura. A performance of these songs is, nonetheless, hugely satisfying for the singer. I was immensely fortunate to be able to learn them with the peerless Russian soprano, Galina Vishnevskaya, whose own interpretation, totally chilling in its visceral emotional totality, can be found on YouTube and on record.
I have had great success with Brahms’ ‘Vier ernste Gesänge’, the last songs he ever wrote. Originally for baritone, you can however find a score transposed down for bass, published by Schott. My copy is priceless, as it is signed by the great singer, Hans Hotter, with whom I studied them in the 1980s. With texts extracted from the bible, the bleakness of the first two songs gives way to a certain tenderness in the third, where death becomes a welcome relief to those who are poor and ill. The fourth song, using the New Testament text from St Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, ends with the great message of consolation – ‘But now are left Faith, Hope and Love, these three, but the greatest of these is Love!’ The vocal line becomes hugely expansive at the end and requires immense breath control and vocal plenitude. Hotter rarely demonstrated in lessons, but when, at the age of 70+, he sang for my benefit the last phrase, it was as if God himself was speaking. Quite remarkable.
A slightly unusual, but rather interesting group of songs I sang a few years ago, was Dvořák’s Biblical Songs, ten songs in Czech from 1894, settings of well-known biblical texts. Obviously, the language is difficult, but the rewards are high in that these are gorgeous songs, much loved by audiences. His setting of ‘The Lord’s my Shepherd’ is very moving.
Schubert’s posthumous cycle, ‘Schwanengesang’, consists of two sets of songs, one by Rellstab and one by Heine. As there is no actual reason, other than a publisher’s whim, to sing all these songs as a cycle, I prefer to sing them separately, in different concerts. Firstly, this seems more likely to be Schubert’s idea (he died before any of these songs were published). Secondly, on a purely practical level, to sing the two groups together, plus the outrider, ‘Die Taubenpost’ (words by Seidl, nothing to do with either set, but probably Schubert’s last song), is quite a test of vocal stamina, as the Rellstab songs in particular are big songs, needing serious singing, with high and low tessitura. Since the two sets seem to have nothing in common, it appears to me a bit silly to exhaust the singer (and the audience) in a vain attempt to make a connection that isn’t there.
I have never felt comfortable with the various Schumann cycles. To me, they seem much better suited to a higher voice, even just a baritone. I have sung ‘Dichterliebe’, and ‘Liederkreis’ Opus 39, and they are great songs, but I didn’t feel they worked for bass. Others may disagree.
One of the standout cycles I have sung over the last 30 years is Vaughan Williams ‘Songs of Travel’, settings of poems, written by Robert Louis Stevenson in Samoa, but about Scotland. As written, they are too high for me, but I was able to obtain a transposition in the late 1980s and I have used it ever since. You can hear my version on my solo CD, released in 2020, accompanied by Alan Jacques, ‘Songs of Stevenson’, available from Birnam CD and Amazon. On that same CD there are two excellent song cycles by Ronald Stevenson, Hills of Home (also R L Stevenson) and Songs from Factories and Fields (words by Hugh MacDiarmid). These are splendid songs and should be heard more. In fact, there are a great number of songs by Ronald Stevenson and also by FG Scott, which all Scottish singers should have in their repertoire. Interestingly, I have just finished an interview with Ronald Stevenson’s widow, Marjorie, which has appeared on the Edinburgh Music Review, and which I cannot recommend too highly. This splendid lady, now in her 90th year, is a fund of knowledge and has a wealth of stories to tell about some of the great Scottish poets and musicians of the 20th century. You will find the interview on this website.
To learn more about all the various songs I have written about today, there is a vast amount of information on the Internet, and to hear some of these songs on record, look no further than the recordings of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Hans Hotter, Jose van Dam for French, and Galina Vishnevskaya for Russian. Other recordings are available! Did I mention ‘Songs of Stevenson’ by Brian Bannatyne-Scott? In addition, coming out very soon is a new CD, ‘Songs of Edinburgh’, featuring Beth Taylor and myself, accompanied by Michał Gajsler, songs and duets with words by Alexander McCall Smith and music by Tom Cunningham. Full details will appear on EMR.
