AILISH TYNAN (Soprano)
Ailish Tynan was born in Mullingar, Ireland, and studied at
Trinity College and the Royal Irish Academy of Music in Dublin,
and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London. In 2003
Ailish represented Ireland in the BBC Cardiff Singer of the World
Competition, winning the BBC Singer of the World Rosenblatt
Recital Prize. Other awards include the Maggie Teyte Competition/
Miriam Licette Award and RTE Millennium Singer of the Future.
Ailish’s operatic appearances include Papagena in Die Zauberflöte
at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden and for Opera Ireland,
Susanna in Le nozze di Figaro for Welsh National Opera, Flora in
Tippett’s The Knot Garden with the BBC Symphony Orchestra with
Sir Andrew Davis, Ännchen in Der Freischütz at the Edinburgh
International Festival under Sir Charles Mackerras and Marzelline in
Fidelio with the National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland in Dublin.
Highlights on the concert platform include a televised programme
of music by Mozart with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra conducted
by Sir Roger Norrington at the 2006 BBC Proms, Carmina Burana
with the Royal Philharmonic, Mahler’s Symphony No 4 with the
Hallé at the Cheltenham Music Festival, Canteloube’s Songs of
the Auvergne with the Ulster Orchestra and Ravel’s Scheherazade
with the BBC Philharmonic. As a recitalist, Ailish has collaborated
with Malcolm Martineau, Graham Johnston, Julius Drake, Barry
Douglas and Iain Burnside, giving recitals at the Edinburgh
International, City of London, Cheltenham Music, and West Cork
Festivals, the Wigmore Hall and St John’s Smith Square, London.
This season Ailish makes her US debut as Zerlina in Don Giovanni
for the Seattle Opera, her European debut as Sophie in Der
Rosenkavalier for the Royal Swedish Opera, and returns to the
Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, to sing Marzelline in Fidelio.
IAIN BURNSIDE (Piano)
As a BBC Radio 3 presenter, Iain Burnside combines life behind the
microphone with life on the piano stool, changing the balance from
week to week. He followed a music degree at Oxford University
with more specific piano study at the Royal Academy of Music and
Warsaw’s Chopin Academy. Working as a freelance pianist, he has
come to specialise in the song repertoire but is, however, allergic to
the word ‘accompanist’, which he tries to avoid wherever possible!
It was this vocal background which led to his first steps in
broadcasting, as presenter of Cardiff Singer of the World. Radio 3
signed him up shortly after, establishing him as the regular presenter
of Voice. In addition Iain has combined his roles as pianist and
presenter in a number of series, including From Where I’m Sitting
on Radio 3, and The Music Party for BBC World Service.
CONCERTS IN THE 2006/2007 SERIES
All at the Sherwell Centre at 7.30pm
CHAMBER ENSEMBLE OF LONDON
Saturday 30 September 2006
NASH ENSEMBLE with IAN BROWN (Piano)
Plymouth Chamber Music Trust’s 100th Concert
Saturday 28 October 2006
DANTE STRING QUARTET
Saturday 18 November 2006
Plymouth
Chamber
Music
VERMEER PIANO TRIO
Saturday 2 December 2006
NAOMI SULLIVAN (Saxophone)
TIM SIDFORD (Piano)
Saturday 20 January 2007
BELCEA STRING QUARTET
Saturday 10 February 2007
AILISH TYNAN
ŠKAMPA STRING QUARTET
Saturday 3 March 2007
IAIN BURNSIDE
Soprano
Piano
AILISH TYNAN (Soprano)
IAIN BURNSIDE (Piano)
Saturday 24 March 2007
ROYAL STRING QUARTET
Saturday 21 April 2007
Concert details can be found on the website www.plyclassical.co.uk
and also on www.plymouth.ac.uk/events to which programme notes
will be added prior to each concert.
7.30pm Saturday 24 March 2007 at the
University of Plymouth Sherwell Centre
SONGS TO SHAKESPEAREAN TEXTS (selection)
Orpheus with his lute
She never told her love
Orpheus with his Lute
Who is Silvia?
Full fathom five
Winter
Arthur Sullivan (1842 – 1900)
Franz Joseph Haydn (1732 – 1809)
Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872 – 1958)
Franz Schubert (1797 – 1828)
Michael Tippett (1905 – 1998)
Dominick Argento (born 1927)
Orpheus with his Lute, from Henry VIII, is one of a set of five
Shakespeare Songs which Sullivan composed during 1863 and 1864.
The others are Sigh No More, Ladies, O Mistress Mine, Rosalind
and The Willow Song. Sullivan sold these songs to the publisher
for five guineas each but it did not take him long to discover this
was a mistake and that if he were paid for songs on a royalty
basis, he could increase his income from them substantially!
Haydn wrote approximately fifty original songs for solo voice and
keyboard. Though the majority are German Lieder, better-known
and admired are his two books of Canzonettas (simple, strophic
songs, often with pastoral themes) written to English poems. He
produced them during his prolonged visits to London, most likely
at the request of his acquaintance, Mrs Anne Hunter, whose original
texts and adaptations are heavily represented in the collections.
Whilst Viola’s poetic lines in Twelfth Night were originally said, some
two hundred years later Haydn produced his effective setting.
If there were a locus classicus of Shakespearean song, most probably
the settings by Ralph Vaughan Williams and Roger Quilter would
represent this, as these two musicians were members of a second
generation of British composers, after Arthur Sullivan and Hubert
Parry who raised the nineteenth century’s ubiquitous parlour ballads
to the loftier ideals embodied by the German art song. Vaughan
Williams in fact made two settings of Orpheus with his Lute.
Schubert’s well-known Who is Silvia?, from Two Gentlemen of
Verona, needs little further comment, except to say that it is
possibly one of the greatest song settings of Shakespeare.
Like Purcell, Tippett was perfectly capable of writing
simple, direct songs for the theatre. His Songs for Ariel, for
a long time all that survived of his incidental music
for a production in 1962, of Shakespeare’s The
Tempest, were written for an actor who might
be male or female and who might lack musical
training. The tessitura of the songs is thus
limited, and their lines unelaborate,
but telling. The second, Full fathom
five, is a song of death and rebirth.
Opera composer, Dominick Argento,
was born in 1927 in York, Pennsylvania,
and received degrees in piano
and composition at the Peabody
Conservatory before continuing
studies at the Eastman School of
Music. He retired some years ago
after almost forty years’ teaching at
the University of Minnesota. His setting of
Winter comes from Love’s Labours Lost, and
is the third of his Six Elizabethan Songs, which,
though written in 1957, were not published until 1970.
LIEDER (selection)
Richard Strauss (1864 – 1949)
Ständchen, Op 17 No 2
Mit deinen blauen Augen, Op 56 No 4
Hat gesagt – bleibt’s dabei, Op 36 No 3
Allerseelen, Op 10 No 8
Schlechtes Wetter, Op 69 No 5
Und morgen wird die Sonne wieder scheinen, Op 69 No 5
Although Richard Strauss is usually associated with the virtuosic
and the large-scale, especially in his operas and tone poems, his
output of lieder reveals an intimate lyricism which complements
the more extrovert aspects of his style. His interest in the song form
continued throughout his compositional career, and included settings
of a variety of poets, mostly German. From a practical perspective,
Strauss performed most of these songs in recitals with his wife Pauline,
travelling throughout Europe and America; between the wars, Strauss
continued this tradition with the soprano Elisabeth Schumann, and
later Elena Gerhardt. The vast majority of the lieder are therefore
settings for soprano voice, but Strauss also dedicated several to the bass
Paul Knüpfer and the baritone Heinrich Schlusnus. These singers were
primarily known for their operatic roles, which may have coloured the
way in which Strauss wrote for the voice. In fact, although the lieder
were obviously written with piano accompaniment, there is often a
strong sense of orchestral colour, and many were later orchestrated.
INTERVAL OF 20 MINUTES
Tickets for the ROYAL STRING QUARTET at the Sherwell Centre
on Saturday 21 April will be on sale during the interval.
SONGS ON TEXTS BY JAMES JOYCE
(from The James Joyce Songbook)
Goldenhair
She weeps over Rahoon
Bahnhofstrasse
Flood
Tutto è Sciolto
Solitary Hotel
Frank Bridge (1879 – 1941)
Herbert Hughes (1882 – 1937)
C W Orr (1893 – 1976)
Herbert Howells (1892 – 1983)
John Ireland (1879 – 1962)
Samuel Barber (1910 – 1981)
Frank Bridge is perhaps more often cited as the teacher of Benjamin
Britten than in recognition of his own works. Bridge kept up with
radical developments in music on the continent, particularly after the
First World War, although all of the composer’s song settings were
composed before a decisive turn to modernism in 1926. Goldenhair is
the fifth poem from Joyce’s Chamber Music.
Herbert Hughes grew up in Belfast and completed his studies with
Stanford at the Royal College of Music in 1901. From 1911 to 1932 he
was the music critic for the Daily Telegraph. She weeps over Rahoon comes
from Joyce’s Pomes Penyeach. Rahoon is in Galway City, on Ireland’s
Atlantic coast.
C W (Charles Wilfred) Orr was born and educated in Cheltenham,
and spent his life in the Cotswolds. His early lessons in piano,
harmony and counterpoint were never intended as the foundation
of a musical career, and it was not until 1917, after a year in the
army, that he decided to take composition lessons under Orlando
Morgan at the Guildhall School of Music. Unfortunately, the
greater part of his life was marred by indifferent health which,
together with the fact that he composed slowly and fitfully
explains the comparative slenderness of his published output.
Bahnhofstrasse (Station Street) also comes from Pomes Penyeach.
Herbert Howells taught composition at the Royal College of Music
and was appointed King Edward VII Professor of Music at the
University of London, though a somewhat anomalous position since
the university had no music faculty at the time. His musical tastes
were similar to those of Vaughan Williams, both Gloucestershire
men in fact, though with Howells the English folk idiom is less
overt. His setting of Flood, again is from Pomes Penyeach.
John Ireland was born near Manchester, and spent most of his life in
London, with interludes in both Sussex and the Channel Islands. He
was a pupil of Stanford at the Royal College of Music and, for most of
his life, retained teaching connections with the institution, where E J
Moeran, Britten and Geoffrey Bush numbered amongst his students.
He remained organist and choirmaster of St Luke’s, Chelsea for
twenty-two years. Tutto è Sciolto (Pomes Penyeach) can be translated as
‘All is lost now’, and is a quotation from Bellini’s opera, La Sonnambula.
A great twentieth-century Romantic, Samuel Barber was born in West
Chester, Pennsylvania to musical parents, and slowly evolved his
own unique musical voice as he travelled the world and surrounded
himself with poets, musicians, and art enthusiasts. A compositional
perfectionist and a consummate tunesmith, Barber had the unique
talent of absorbing every style the twentieth century had to offer,
seamlessly integrating them into his work, yet always retaining control
of his lyrical vision. Solitary Hotel was composed between 1968 and
1969, and belongs to a suite of five songs entitled Despite and Still. The
lyrics are taken from Ulysses, Joyce’s controversial Dublin-set novel.
IRISH FOLK-SONG ARRANGEMENTS
Herbert Hughes (1882 – 1937)
I’m a decent good Irish body
I will walk with my love
The Gartan Mother’s lullaby
B for Barney
Oh breathe not his name
She moved thro’ the fair
The Leprechaun
Hughes was a founder-member of the Irish Folk Song Society of
London in 1903 and co-editor of its Journal. He was an active folksong collector and amassed over a thousand melodies, most of them
unpublished. Many of these able arrangements deserve high merits
for their impressionist qualities. His most important volumes were the
Irish Country Songs which appeared in 1909, 1915, 1934 and 1936.
Programme Notes by Philip R Buttall