Exquisite Eloquence
Music at Paxton, Paxton House, Friday 26th July 2024
Exquisite Eloquence, Mark Padmore, Tenor, and Jocelyn Freeman, Piano
Once again, the excellent music festival at Paxton House near Berwick-upon-Tweed in the Scottish Borders is in full swing, and I decided to go and hear my old colleague, Mark Padmore, in recital with the fine Welsh pianist, Jocelyn Freeman. As ever, Music at Paxton provides a week-long programme of chamber music, featuring a mixture of established artists and exciting new talent, under the guiding eye of its Artistic Director, Angus Smith.
This artistic pairing of one of Britain’s foremost tenors with the much younger founder-director of SongEasel, a platform for song in Southeast London, made for an interesting evening, and a reasonable audience was rewarded with a fascinating programme, loosely based on the idea of the wandering artist.
I go back a long way with Mark Padmore, as I sang with him in a concert performance of Britten’s ‘Peter Grimes’ in the Endellion Festival in Cornwall with Richard Hickox, at the moment when he broke out, as it were, from the world of Baroque music into more mainstream opera, as the eponymous fisherman of the title. From singing wonderfully with such prestigious groups as the Tallis Scholars, the Hilliard Ensemble and the Sixteen, Mr Padmore went on to grace the stages of some of the great theatres of the world in roles such as Captain Vere (‘Billy Budd’), Peter Quint (‘The Turn of the Screw’) and Titus in ‘La Clemenza di Tito.’ In addition, he established himself as perhaps the foremost modern Evangelist in Bach’s St Matthew Passion, and, after the tragic death of Sir Richard Hickox, he was from 2012 -2022 Artistic Director of that very same Endellion Festival in which we appeared many years ago. During all this time, Mr Padmore has been singing song recitals, and it was as a sublime recitalist that we heard him at Paxton on Friday.
He and Ms Freeman had put together an eclectic programme of songs, starting with a German Lieder section featuring Schubert, Beethoven, the Schumanns, Robert and Clara, and Brahms. Moving via Fauré into John Ireland and Vaughan Williams, they eventually came to the heart of the recital in Benjamin Britten’s ‘Winter Words’. En route, they introduced me to a composer of whom I was ignorant, Rebecca Clarke (1886-1979), of whom more later.
By no stretch of the imagination would Mark Padmore be described as an operatic tenor, and indeed his vocal technique could be said to avoid most of the rules in the book, but somehow over the years he has developed his voice into a most versatile and expressive instrument, with a wide range of colours and shades, and no little heft when needed. If you add to this an extremely imaginative and quite histrionic style on the podium (slightly too histrionic at times?), you get a package which makes for a most interesting concert, and that was what we got!
The duo started with a group of Schubert songs, which established the mood of wandering, and indeed the first song was Das Wandern, itself the first song of the song cycle, ‘Die Schöne Müllerin’ (the Fair Maid of the Mill), which the composer wrote in 1823, to words by Wilhelm Müller. This is a cycle which I have always avoided performing myself, as I feel it is perfectly suited to the tenor voice, with its lighter tone and texture, and it was most expressively sung by Mr Padmore. The acoustic in the Picture Gallery at Paxton is a warm one, and perfect for a voice as full of nuances as our singer tonight, and each verse of this delightful song (as yet giving no hint of the tragedy to come) was described with care. Next, we heard ‘Der Musensohn’, one of Schubert’s most jaunty songs, with a fantastic accompaniment, superbly played by Ms Freeman. Finally, in this group, we heard ‘Der Wanderer an den Mond’, a song I didn’t know. In it, with words by Seidl (who provided Schubert at the very end of his life with ‘Die Taubenpost’), the poet compares his wandering on earth to the moon’s journey across the sky.
Next, we had Beethoven’s marvellous scena for tenor, ‘Adelaide’, an early song from 1794/95. This is an extended song, giving both singer and accompanist many opportunities to show their skill in interpretation, and we were treated to a finely tuned mini-drama.
The following three songs were composed by the three musicians who formed one of the most fascinating, but chaste, menages à trois in history, Robert and Clara Schumann and Johannes Brahms. The younger man was smitten by his friend’s wife, but decorum and eventually Clara’s devotion to her husband’s memory after his death, kept the relationship on an even keel.
Each song explored an aspect of German Romanticism, passion within while a storm rages outside, the tale of the Lorelei and her siren call and, in ‘Meerfahrt’ (a sea journey), a couple drift by an enchanted island, unresponsive to its temptations, lost in their own exquisite melancholy.
A couple of songs by Gabriel Fauré followed, and I particularly enjoyed the superb Les Berceaux, from 1879, in which a comparison is made between the ships of their departing husbands and the cradles of babies, tended by the wives left behind. Mr Padmore rose magnificently to the challenge of this beautiful song, as the poet tells us that women shall weep while their men search the horizon for adventure.
The final three songs before the interval continued the theme of wandering, with John Ireland’s famous setting of John Masefield’s ‘Sea Fever’ (I must go down to the seas again), Vaughan Williams’ ‘The Vagabond’ from ‘Songs of Travel’ and Frank Bridge’s ‘Journey’s End’, where the journey is life itself. I love the John Ireland song; it was one of the first songs I ever learned as a student, and it still haunts me to this day – “and all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow rover, and a quiet sleep and a sweet dream, when the long trick’s over!” It was beautifully performed by Mark Padmore and Jocelyn Freeman.
After the interval, we heard a couple of songs from Charles Villiers Stanford, a famous name from Anglican church music but an unknown quantity to me as a song writer. The duo performed a setting of Keats’ poem ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ and the first song of his ‘Songs of the Sea’ from 1904, ‘Drake’s Drum’. Both were given atmospheric and intelligent renditions.
Next, Padmore and Freeman gave us three songs by the Anglo-American composer, Rebecca Clarke (1886-1979). She was a renowned viola player, who was one of the earliest female professional orchestral players, having been selected by Henry Wood in 1912 to play in the Queen’s Hall Orchestra in London. Her compositions suffered from the neglect that befell many works by female composers before our perhaps more enlightened era, but she wrote several songs, and I was particularly taken with ‘The Sealman’ and ‘Tyger, Tyger’. The Sealman tells of a seal who assumes the form of a man to lure a woman back into the sea, failing to understand that she will not be able to breathe in his domain. The Tyger song is a setting of William Blake’s famous poem, from 1794, ‘Tyger, Tyger, burning bright, in the forests of the Night’, and is a terrific piece, given full rein by Mr Padmore, with Rebecca Clarke’s vocal line doing proper justice to Blake’s poetry.
The recital ended with a performance of Benjamin Britten’s ‘Winter Words’, written for Peter Pears in 1953. Mark Padmore is a noted interpreter of Britten, and he brought all his experience and artistry to these eight songs, settings of poems by Thomas Hardy. The audience sat spellbound as these exquisite miniatures unfolded before us, with scenes of rural life and early train journeys, and both Mr Padmore and Ms Freeman were extremely well-matched as interpreters. I wondered if Mark had studied, as I did, with Sir Peter Pears, and asked him at the informal Q and A which followed the recital. Unfortunately, he said, he had only studied at Aldeburgh just after Pears’ death in 1986 and missed the opportunity to work with Britten’s muse. I have no doubt that Peter would have been full of admiration for this intelligent and expressive singer, who, with an encore of another Rebecca Clarke song, ended a fascinating and moving recital, which I enjoyed enormously. Jocelyn Freeman was an able and gifted accompanist, who I note calls herself a collaborative pianist, a phrase stating clearly that she is part of a duo and not just an adjunct to the singer. Her introductions, which she shared with Mr Padmore, were interesting and informative, and indeed very welcome to many in the audience, who were given little written material about the programme.
Bravo to Music at Paxton for bringing these superb musicians to the festival, and I look forward to seeing next year’s programme, Creative Scotland willing!
