Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin
André Previn – Honey and Rue.
Messiaen – Poèmes pour Mi.
This recital at the Hugh Lane Gallery was a rare and welcome opportunity to hear song cycles from both halves of the 20th century.
The first of these was Honey and Rue, André Previn’s settings of six poems by the writer and academic Toni Morrison.
They were premiered in 1992, the year before Morrison received her Nobel Prize in Literature, and they combine her grand themes and Afro-American perspective with a wide range of now-jazzy, now-spiritual, now-Bernstein-esque American musical styles from Previn.
The texts are still in copyright and so were not provided to the audience. This, I think, obliged the performers to provide listeners with more background and context than they did, or at least to ensure that the words were always clear throughout the performance.
They weren’t.
Virginia Kerr's delivery on this occasion seemed more based on capturing the expressive essence of the song rather than on rendering a text – with music – for an audience to respond to. This was the case even in the set's lone unaccompanied song, Do you know him?
Comprehension was further impeded in livelier songs – such as The town is lit– when pianist Thérèse Fahy tended to underestimate the volume she was generating.
Curiously, happily, these issues receded considerably in the final song – a bluesy, southern setting of Take my mother home– leaving you wishing the rest of the set could have been so.
The Messiaen songs are also in copyright, with the problem for listeners of not having the text in hand compounded by the songs being in French. Kerr kept to the style she used in the Previn, so that the emotion of the songs – written by the composer as a wedding present for his first wife – was again more accessible than the texts themselves.
To be blunt, this wasn't Winterreise,and you'd want to have known your Morrison and Messiaen texts well beforehand in order to get much out of this concert. You'd wonder what percentage of the audience did. You'd wonder whether the performers wondered.
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