How can the voice and piano recital be made contemporary? In his engaging introduction, baritone Oskar McCarthy said that he’s essentially a dramatic theatre singer who wants to present an art song recital on his own terms. Along with pianist Ben Smith, one of their aims for their 3 Nov. recital at City St George’s, University of London was to have a strong underlying theme for the programme. Titled ‘Voices Under Pressure,’ the programme featured four contemporary British song cycles depicting something extreme at stake for the protagonist, whether that be emotional or environmental.
Composers seem to love the challenge of setting a huge variety of source material to music, and the texts in this programme ranged from traditional poetry to intimate journal entries, letters, and journalistic reporting. It was good to hear two established composers whose music is all too rarely performed in concert, Eleanor Alberga and Michael Parsons, alongside two composers of the younger generation, Yshani Perinpanayagam and Cameron Biles-Liddell.
Eleanor Alberga’s The Soul’s Expression featured poetry by three British women who made a major contribution to 19th-century literature: Mary Ann Evans (under the pen name George Eliot), Emily Brontë, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Composed in 2017 for baritone and string orchestra in a late Romantic/expressionist vein, the work was presented in a voice/piano version, giving Smith a significant role as the piano writing was more substantial and enticing than the rather generic text setting.
The four songs were linked by transition material, and an unusual structural feature was a phrase from Eliot’s Adam Bede, ‘Let evil words die as they are spoken,’ presented in full after the first song and then in different fragmentary forms after the other three. The piano became denser and more intense at these moments before segueing to the next song. McCarthy had an authoritative stage presence, a still figure whose gestures were few but meaningful.
Both performers rose to the interpretive challenge of Three Arctic Songs by Michael Parsons, who is now almost 88 and still composing. Parsons’ spare yet moving music has made a distinctive contribution to the UK scene since the 1960s, when he was a member of the Scratch Orchestra associated with Cornelius Cardew. Three Arctic Songs drew on the journals of the late-19th-century Norwegian Arctic explorer Fridtjof Nansen, and Parsons’ setting was characteristically unadorned, reflecting the unyielding chill of the polar environment. Parsons wisely decided not to word-paint the violent descriptions of cracking ice; less was more expressively speaking, and the two performers’ controlled intensity was compelling.
Cage Letters by the versatile pianist, composer, and broadcaster Yshani Perinpanayagam is based on correspondence from John Cage to Merce Cunningham written in the early days of their relationship. Perinpanayagam knew how to balance the voice and piano effectively: the often-lyrical piano part was independent, yet did not get in the way of the vocal line. Her song cycle was an excellent showcase for the expressive range and power of McCarthy’s voice.
Sometimes hesitant, sometimes vehemently passionate, her settings were unafraid to impose a structure and dynamic momentum on Cage’s prose. The final ‘Song for Merce’ was a melodic intertwining of single lines to a text that was suggestively erotic, contrasting with the explicitly sexual second song. Sympathetically written and uncompromising in its expression, this was my favourite work on the programme.
The Welsh composer Cameron Biles-Liddell references his heritage in his 2023 song cycle Below Ground: three songs with a piano interlude drawing on words and testimony from Welsh and Cornish mining communities. He aimed to capture the danger of the mines and the courage of workers, and in the final song, he wanted to express a sense of community by creating an imaginary folksong.
The texts ranged from an extract of a speech by King George V on a Welsh mining disaster to journalistic accounts of miners’ lives, and Biles-Liddell perhaps deliberately treated them all the same, stressing the workers’ experience rather than the status of the author. The melismatic vocal writing was refreshingly distinct from the rest of the programme, though the final song didn’t quite cohere: the vivid, lively piano part sounded convincingly like a folksong accompaniment, while the florid vocal line came from the world of the art song.
Throughout, McCarthy and Smith were ideal advocates for the composers. Smith’s stunning variety of touch, dynamic shading, and tone colour as well as his easy virtuosity make him one of the leading contemporary music pianists on the UK scene, and McCarthy’s winning stage presence and excellent diction made the best possible case for all the works. They showed how diverse contemporary composers can be effectively programmed together; anyone who thinks the song recital is a dying art would have their mind changed by this duo.
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