Music
Hebrides Ensemble
Perth Concert Hall
Keith Bruce
five stars
SOPRANOS Assemble! Ailish Tynan and composer Judith Weir have an absolute gem of an addition to your repertoire which you would be mad not to have a look at. Composed as a companion piece to the Chansons madecasses by Ravel for the same instrumentation of piano, flute and cello, Weir’s Nuits d’Afrique take their texts from a contemporary anthology of French-language verse by African women, each beautifully matching the words to evocative music, from the opening Berceuse (Lullaby) to the atmospheric landscape of Le village by way of the percussive Le tam-tam and a wonderful, hilarious plea of mitigation for the Crocodile, with Will Conway’s cello as the put-upon creature slithering into the river Niger.
Tynan delivered these superb songs in engaging style with fine diction, and her usual full warm tone and performing charm, just as she did the Ravel songs themselves which closed the programme. It seems likely that his texts are a great deal less authentic, coming from a book of the same era as James MacPherson’s Ossian poems, and composed by a Frenchman who would be very aware of Debussy’s Chanson de Bilitis, setting the spurious ancient texts of Pierre Louys, but they are full of drama, and follow an arc that Weir has echoed but not slavishly followed. Tynan’s performance found all of their drama, Charlotte Ashton her excellent foil on flute and piccolo, and it was a treat to hear the singer on 20th - and 21st - century repertoire.
The Hebrides Ensemble presented these two vocal delights in the context of a flowing programme of instrumental music that is no more widely familiar, and encompassed a superb performance by violinist Zoe Beyers of Rosalie Burrell’s Early Light, a very fine very recent addition to the group’s book. It began with Rebecca Clarke’s Morpheus, with Catherine Marwood on viola and Huw Watkins superb on the smashing piano part. This was an aperitif a great deal less light that it first appeared. The Weir songs were followed by the four-movement String Trio by Jean Francaix from 1933, a vibrant work that ends in the lively style in which it begins, but with a dance that seemingly exhausts itself in the middle, and via a more contemplative third movement.
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