Shakespeare in Song: Taylor Wilson Sings the Bard

Stockbridge Church - 3/11/23

Taylor Wilson, voice | Neil Metcalfe, piano | Clea Friend, cello

Fraser Grant and Taylor Wilson, co-directors

I had never heard Taylor Wilson sing, but Hugh Kerr’s glowing review of her performance in the Festival Fringe made me sorry that I had missed her show.  So I was delighted to hear that Clea Friend, Community Music Organiser at Stockbridge Church, had invited her to give a lunchtime concert of ‘Shakespeare in Song.’ The church altar provides a spacious performing area, and Clea was on stage herself to add her cello to Neal Metcalfe’s piano accompaniment. Taylor’s delightful and flexible mezzo is complemented by this stylish musical partnership.

The printed programme listing settings from Henry Purcell to John Dankworth was enticing enough, but Taylor’s (and fellow director, Fraser Grant’s) visualisation of the songs into a theatrical linked presentation raises the concert to another level. Taylor, tall and striking in white shirt and black trousers, acts out each song, not only with her voice, but through gestures and stage movement.  Spoken text from the plays provides added clarity. She prefaces Schubert’s well-known ‘An Sylvia’ with the song’s text in English, delivered to express the narrator’s scorn and perhaps jealousy of Sylvia, cutting through the sweetness of Schubert’s setting. 

‘Fear No More the Heat of the Sun’ in Gerald Finzi’s arrangement is a song setting which seems ideally fitted to the text.  Taylor sings it beautifully in the lower part of her register, but before and after the song, during the cello and piano accompaniment, speaks these lines from ‘Cymbeline’: “He was a queen’s son, boys/And though he came our enemy, remember/He was paid for that…Bury him as a prince.”  By providing, and acting out the context, we’re given a fuller appreciation of this moving song. 

Rufus Wainwright’s experiments in arranging Shakespeare’s sonnets include the lesser known Sonnet 66, ‘Tired with all these for restful death I cry’.  In its German translation ‘All Dessen Müd’’ it becomes a Kurt Weill cabaret setting, with Taylor delivering an compelling Brechtian act, tying on a neck-ruff to indicate her new persona.  

I was a fan of John Dankworth’s ‘Shakespeare and All that Jazz’ from the beginning and remember hearing Cleo Laine sing some of them with Dankworth in Edinburgh in the 70s. The set concludes with four of these settings with Taylor letting rip on ‘Dunsinane Blues’.  The witches, the posh servant and a Glaswegian Malcom all have their distinctive voices in this irreverent retelling of the last Act of the Scottish play. A scroll is unravelled for the final number ‘The Compleat Works’ - all the way through from ‘Henry IV Part 1’ to ‘Love’s Labours’ Lost.’   A delighted audience, some established fans, but many like me hearing Taylor for the first time, provide loud applause for all three musicians.  We are rewarded with an Edith Piaf encore – and the excellent news from Clea Friend that she is planning a week of French music in March to which Taylor Wilson has agreed to contribute her Piaf performance.