Music

The Voice of Desire, RCS, Glasgow

Michael Tumelty

four stars

GRRR. Don't talk to me about love. Fine when it's in bloom. But it always ends messily. A splendid, extended Valentine weekend in music, which had featured the blazing Latin passions of Jean-Claude Picard's stunning RSNO concert on Saturday, culminated yesterday in a sophisticated, intimate recital, put together in the Royal Conservatoire by vocal guru Tim Dean, and featuring three fine singers, currently studying, or recently-graduated from their studies, in the Masters' of Music programme.

Dean's concept, representing love through the avian musical community, brought the full flight of that community winging into the RCS, with the gorgeously-voiced soprano and mezzo pair, Julia Daramy-Williams and Grace Durham, with burnished baritone David Horton, all furnishing the birds'-eye view of love from composers ranging from Schumann and Schubert to Judith Weir, Britten, Faure and Ravel. Every bird in the belfry was represented, with lots of chirruping and chattering, loads of nightingales, with even a brace of storks and that damned tit-willow exercising their lungs. Tim Dean provided the chiming and a few pianistic chirrups of his own.

Lovely, characterful singing from the vocalists, superbly-apposite accompaniments from Dean, and a warm, magical ethos generated in the room, except for Faure's stuck-up swan with his nose-beak in the air. Then it was over, and, full of bonhomie, awaiting my taxi, I didn't even mind the Glasgow pigeon scuttling about my feet, mopping up dropped crumbs from my sarnie; not until he flew off abruptly, leaving his own Valentine card on the toecap of my shoe. If my walking stick had been a rifle, he'd be a dead doo the noo. Love? It's for the birds.