Hugh Lane Gallery, Dublin
Music by Purcell, Handel, Mozart and Haydn
The young Irish soprano Roísín O’Grady studied music in Cork and Glasgow before spending two years as a member of the National Chamber Choir, where I first heard her as an appealing occasional soloist.
This has been an important year for her, as she establishes her solo career, making strong impressions in oratorio – including Handel’s Solomon with the Guinness Choir and, as recently as last week, Messiah with the Culwick Choral Society.
In the Hugh Lane Gallery's free midday concert she teamed up with Malcolm Proud for a solo song recital, nicely demonstrating this very different dimension of her work. She opened with three songs by Henry Purcell, introducing her refined, clear sound in Fairest Isle, before really unlocking the expressive potential of If Music Be the Food of Love– in Purcell's slow, arioso-like third setting – beautifully phrasing its long melismatic lines.
The third song, The Blessed Virgin's Expostulation, recounting in almost recitative style Mary's distress upon discovering that the 12-year-old Jesus has been left behind in Jerusalem, revealed an engaging narrative element in O'Grady's presentation.
She then moved from narrative to dramatic in songs by Mozart, in the ambivalent warning issued by one girl to others to avoid the sorcerer in the woods ( Der Zauberer), and in a raging address to a collection of love-letters as she burns them ( Als Luise die Briefeto a text by an 18-year-old girl). She finished with five songs by Haydn, notably the languorous She Never Told Her Lovefrom Twelfth Night. Malcolm Proud – long associated with period performance and keyboards of instruments of the baroque age – partnered O'Grady variously on both harpsichord and piano, today's instrument of choice in the music of the ages that followed.
On the harpsichord he perfectly complemented his singer in the conceit and decorative detail of each of the Purcell songs. He also played the Suite No 5 in E by Handel, all in one key, essential contrast deriving rather from the differing character of each new movement – variously densely wrought, or dancing and graceful, or busy and spirited – all wholly inhabited by Proud.
He turned then to the piano for the songs by Mozart and Haydn, matching O’Grady in the energetic animation of pictorial detail and emotional message.
