David John Pike: Immortal and Beloved
McPherson Recital Room, Laidlaw Music Centre, University of St Andrews - 28/03/24
50 years ago, I arrived as a fresh faced, long haired undergraduate at St Andrews University, all set to study French and Mediaeval History for four years, and to do a bit of singing as well. After a long career as an opera singer, and ten years as Honorary Professor of Singing at St Andrews, I found myself back in the Auld Grey Toun on Thursday for a very interesting song recital by the Canadian/Luxembourgish baritone, David John Pike. I had heard good reports of this singer, and so I took the opportunity of returning to St Andrews for this recital in the magnificent McPherson Room of the new Laidlaw Music Centre in St Andrews University.
Accompanied on the piano by the Canadian musicologist and composer, James Wright, and with the participation of the Edinburgh-based violinist and cellist, Aisling O’Dea and Clea Friend, we heard a programme of Schubert, Beethoven, Wright and Vaughan Williams. This was a really excellent recital, played to a tragically small audience. The proximity of the Easter holiday, and the low profile of the performers, were presumably the reasons for such a poor turnout, but the absentees missed a superb concert of fantastic music, worthy of a much bigger audience.
Firstly, we heard the Sonatensatz in B flat Major by Franz Schubert, a one movement piano trio written at the tender age of 15, the composer already showing astonishing ability and imagination. This established the sonority of the trio in the performance space, which we were to hear much more of later in the recital with the addition of a voice.
Four years after the Sonatensatz, in 1816, Beethoven composed his song cycle, An die ferne Geliebte (To the distant Beloved) for voice and piano. This was historically the first ever song cycle, the precursor for a genre which was to sweep Europe over the next hundred years and more. It is through-composed, in other words it flows from beginning to end with no break between songs. The six poems were written by Alois Jeitteles, an Austrian doctor, journalist and sometime poet, aged 21 at the time, an acquaintance of Beethoven’s. Whether he was asked to write them for the cycle, or whether Beethoven chose the poems himself, is yet another mystery in the intriguing story of the great composer, but the sense of yearning and longing for a lover far away is wonderfully romantic, and suited his inspiration at this stage of his career, as his deafness became worse and his optimism faded. Napoleon’s cataclysmic defeat at Waterloo in 1815 changed the shape of Europe, and a loss of hope in general and a fear for his health must have made Jeitteles’ poems seem very apt - “and you sing, you sing the songs I am singing, from a full and simple heart, from a heart that knows such longing.”
I have always loved singing these wonderful songs, and I was delighted to find an excellent interpreter in David John Pike, a Canadian baritone who has studied with Daniel Lewis Williams and the great Sherrill Milnes. Having relocated to Luxembourg, right in the heart of Europe, he continues to have a fine career, both in opera and concert. This is a proper baritone voice, firm and rich, with a terrific, exciting top to his voice, and his performance of the Beethoven cycle was very endearing, wanting only a little more rehearsal time to be completely anchored.
After a short interval, all four performers appeared on the stage, to play James Wright’s composition from 2012, a setting of excerpts from Beethoven’s mysterious letters to the ‘Immortal Beloved’ for baritone/mezzo soprano and piano trio. These letters, found in Beethoven’s room after his death, add to the myth of the composer’s troubled life. Who were they written to, did he send them, were they returned? Nobody knows, although James Wright, in his introduction to the songs, made a good case for them being addressed to Josephine Brunsvik, a woman Beethoven was infatuated with but who was beyond his station socially. It seems these love letters addressed to ‘die unsterbliche Geliebte’ contained all his deepest longings and hopes. “Oh God, so near, so far! Is not our love a true heavenly edifice, and as firm as the vaults of heaven?” Who could resist? Except it seems that he probably didn’t send the letters, and she probably would have resisted!
We are indebted to James Wright for giving musical life to these sentiments, and his three song cycle was a revelation. In a modern idiom but grounded in harmony, and very well set for the baritone voice, the songs, with important parts for all three instruments in the trio, took us into the heart of Beethoven’s essentially hopeless longing, and were very well performed. Mr Pike’s full range was tested and it was nice to hear the operatic quality of the voice given free expression. Again despite limited rehearsal, the performers gave a superb rendition, receiving noisy acclamation from the listeners.
The recital ended with a new version for piano trio and baritone, by the Ukrainian composer, Bodana Frolyak, of Vaughan Williams wonderful song cycle, Songs of Travel. This is a cycle I have been singing for nearly 40 years now, but this arrangement was new to me. Premiered in 1904, these are Vaughan Williams’ first songs and are settings of some of Robert Louis Stevenson’s posthumously published collection ‘Songs of Travel and other verses’. The poems were written in Samoa but are nostalgic recollections of Stevenson’s youth in Scotland, and would have been quite fresh sounding to the 32 year old composer. Originally set for baritone and piano, Vaughan Williams, and his assistant, Roy Douglas, later orchestrated the songs, but I much prefer them with piano accompaniment, and couldn’t really see the point of this version, well performed though it was. The piano trio played superbly, and some of the effects were interesting, but, by adding two extra instruments, the voice was forced to project more than necessary, reducing the potential for much subtlety of phrasing. In particular, the fabulous arpeggio accompaniment of the second song, ‘Let Beauty awake’, was somewhat lost in the mix, and the stark emptiness of ‘In Dreams’ lacked its deep and lonely melancholy.
Nonetheless, the many-coloured facets of Mr Pike’s voice were heard to great effect, especially in the first and third songs, and it was great to hear a proper operatic voice singing these marvellous songs, too often the domain of British choral tradition baritones. Having sung a lot in Canada myself, I can attest to the great variety of baritones coming out of that vast country, from Gerald Finley to Joshua Hopkins (who Edinburgh audiences will hear as Olivier in ‘Capriccio’ at this year’s International Festival), and David John Pike is a worthy addition to that list. A tall man, with impressive stage presence, he dominated proceedings throughout the evening, and it was only a pity that so few were there to hear him! Aisling O’Dea, Clea Friend and James Wright played their part in a delightful concert, and their encore of Beethoven’s setting of ‘Bonnie Laddie, Hielan’ Laddie with Mr Pike making a heroic stab at the Scots pronunciation, was very well received.
