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Reviews from Series One and Two

Amanda Roocroft, Middle Temple Hall, London

Financial Times 25 May 2007 Andrew Clark

If you are lucky, a song recitalist will take you to the edge of an inner world. A select few know how to draw you in further. And then there’s Amanda Roocroft. Her peachy soprano may be what we hear, but it is her heart that does the singing. This recital, part of the “Julius Drake and Friends” series at Middle Temple, revealed Roocroft at the peak of her powers – a fully matured artist who combines technical and interpretative control with emotional freedom.

What’s so wonderful about Roocroft, apart from her million-dollar looks and the natural confidence of her platform manner, is that she respects the “outer” demands of line and style – the demands that give much of the song repertoire its chaste beauty – while communicating an aching romantic charge. In the naked arena of a song recital, such sincerity of feeling is only possible from someone who has lived a life.

Rakhmaninov and Tchaikovsky dominated the programme – a good choice, for Russian doom-and-gloom finds extra poignancy in Roocroft’s voluptuous innocence. “Do not believe me, friend” was the pick of her opening Rakhmaninov group, its surging moods profiled not just by her bold dynamic arcs but also by Drake’s spirited pianism. Their Tchaikovsky was even more intense, and yet the striking quality about “None but the lonely heart” was the manner in which art concealed art – one of Roocroft’s golden charms.

Another is her ability to communicate with an audience through a foreign tongue: after the interval her second Rakhmaninov group was less brooding but her body-language just as truthful. There was an operatic quality about “The Soldier’s Wife” and “Spring Torrents” that exposed a hard-pressed top, an impression mollified by the conversational playfulness of “They Replied” and the dreamy blossom of “Lilacs”.

With a rapturous “Ständchen”, the first of eight Strauss songs, we were on the home straight – but in spite of a sunnier musical climate the emotional tide was every bit as strong. It was impossible not to be swept along by the melodic flow of “Heimliche Aufforderung”, and the ecstatic ardour of “Befreit” was overwhelming. Roocroft understands that the essence of the art song is not its outer beauty of form but its inner depth of feeling. She is a national treasure.
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24 April 2007 Mark Padmore and Julius Drake

Independent on Sunday,

6 May 2007

Anna Picard

………..Which brings me, belatedly, to Julius Drake and Mark Padmore's performance of Die schöne Müllerin in Middle Temple Hall, part of a recital series curated by Drake that continues this week with Christianne Stotijn. Schubert's first great song cycle is a tirelessly fascinating and disturbing work, and heard in a setting which allows for far softer dynamics than the Wigmore Hall, the change of tone between "Die liebe Farbe" and "Die böse Farbe" was almost physically painful. Padmore has an extraordinary ability to inhabit sorrow in his singing and I left feeling dreadfully bleak.

For lovers of lieder, melancholics and masochists, I can't recommend this series highly enough.

Padmore/Drake
at Middle Temple Hall, London
Erica Jeal
Tuesday May 1, 2007
The Guardian

Julius Drake is one of the most sought-after pianists by UK singers, and the Temple Song series has his bulging contacts book to thank for a roster of programmes that would be highlights at the Wigmore Hall. One such chance would be to hear Mark Padmore, one of the finest Schubert singers around, traverse the 20 songs of love and loss that make up Die Schöne Müllerin.

However, the equally rarefied Middle Temple Hall, with its stained-glass coats of arms, louring portraits, and suits of armour, is a very different venue from the Wigmore - atmospheric, certainly, but with a churchy acoustic in which detail can get lost……Yet the care that went into the balance between voice and piano was paramount. It was most noticeable in Impatience, where Drake's fast, repeated piano chords were kept unusually light and distinct. In the final Lullaby, Padmore spun arching, airy lines while taking care to give every syllable its due weight.

Padmore's miller boy is less the naive dreamer than a cocky labourer, surprised more by the intensity of his first love than by the angry jealousy that ensues. And yet with the song Pause, he and Drake slowed the pace down to one of real contemplation. It made the song a moment of self-knowledge, the fulcrum of an intelligent and moving interpretation.

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Reviews of 14 February recital

'An evening in heaven'

Concerts often aim for that serendipitous state where music, performers, venue and occasion meld in magical fusion; the offering by pianist Julius Drake and four vocal friends was one of those rare events that actually achieved it. Under the thoughtful gaze of Van Dyck's Charles I, the hammer-beamed, armour-lined Middle Temple Hall was the ideal space in which the love-lyrics of Schumann and Brahms could take wing; soprano Ailish Tynan, mezzo Christine Rice, tenor James Gilchrist and baritone Christopher Maltman were a dream team.

Schumann once opined that while "spirits speak the language of poetry, angels communicate through music": no wonder his solo songs don't hit the button the way his solo piano pieces do. But his "Spanisches Liederspiel" - a dramatic song-sequence - somehow incorporates the wayward brilliance of the piano music. He chooses his lyrics from far and wide - the most suggestive are verse dialogues by Robert Burns - and he weaves a tapestry that these performers realised to perfection. It helped that all four are top-flight opera singers, all equally at home in tragedy and comedy: it was hard to square Rice's voluptuous presence here with the coke-snorting masculine tearaway she plays on other nights of the week in the ENO's Agrippina. Although, when Gilchrist leavened his amorous torments with deliciously ingenuous innuendo, one remembered that he also makes an hilarious Frederic in The Pirates of Penzance. Supported by Drake's responsive touch, they spun wonderful spells.

After the interval came Brahms's Liebeslieder Walzer. While Schumann explores his passions, Brahms goes straight to his target. Each of his 18 songs is a miracle of condensed expression, some only 50 seconds long. His male voices shout out in anguish, his women sigh and moan; when all sing together, the tempestuous cross-currents are forged into a communal outpouring of joy and sadness, which makes the senses swirl.

At first they didn't find the balance these songs require. But when they got it, this extraordinary work took off. Some songs hit you between the eyes with their explosive force, others became dramas in miniature. The last - "The bushes are trembling" - came like a delicate breath of wind, which mysteriously vanished into the distance whence it had come. An evening in heaven.

The Independent

Concert Liebeslieder

A nudge, a wink, a coy glance: this isn’t the normal framework for a night of lieder, where young love tends to turn inexorably into young misery.

But reporting on his mostly sunny Spanisches Liederspiel, Schumann mistakently predicted that these ten songs for four singers and piano would be his best known, “due to the happy and charming verse”. On Valentine’s night in the atmospheric Middle Temple Hall you can almost see his point of view, particularly when such a well-blended lineup as Christine Rice, Ailish Tynan, Christopher Maltman and James Gilchrist were entrusted with finding the right balance between “happy and charming” and saccharine and gooey, and nearly always managed it.

As the thread that pulls the quartet together, Julius Drake’s eloquent accompaniment went some way to belie the composer’s own cheerful aspirations. In the limpid waters of Intermezzo, he plunged in with soulful abandon, and as Rice and Tynan’s perfectly complementary voices — the mezzo velvety and imposing, the soprano all light and air — faded out of Liebesgram, Drake gave us an ethereal postlude. But Tynan and Gilchrist were the undisputed stars of the gorgeous duet In der Nacht, Tynan particularly ravishing as she gracefully intertwined with Gilchrist’s mellow tenor.

But no one wanting more froth and less introspection would have been disappointed.In the gleeful numbers for all four singers, everyone radiated joyful spontaneity, an atmosphere that carried over into Brahms’s echt-Viennese Liebeslieder Walzer. This is slighter material, but the expressive contrasts between the singers, as well as the rapport between the duetting pianists (Drake and an attentive Anna Tilbrook) were ample enough reason to hear it.

The Times

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Reviews of recital on 26 January 2007

Until he woke without a voice yesterday morning, Philip Langridge was due to open the new series of song recitals at Middle Temple Hall. Deploying an address book second to none, series curator Julius Drake secured the services of Ian Bostridge, no less, who offered half the scheduled programme prefaced by a Schubert group already honed for a Paris recital next week.

The historic Middle Temple Hall, with its exquisite decoration and double hammerbeam roof, is - now that the acoustic and lighting problems have been solved - an ideal venue for song. It helped that Bostridge, with his nonchalant platform manner (hand in pocket, pacing the stage), included the entire audience with his laser-beam gaze.

The Schuberts were characterised by the intense, highly inflected delivery we have come to expect from Bostridge: every word weighed and weighted, its essence extracted, the vocal line moulded to capture that essence. After an eloquent account of Britten's Winter Words, rising to a fiercely interrogative climax - how long before innocence be regained, the poet asks? - Bostridge was joined by the countertenor Iestyn Davies for a quietly moving performance of Britten's Canticle No2, Abraham and Isaac: the clash of filial love and duty distilled.

Evening Standard

The season of winter colds can be a perilous one for promoters of song recitals. On Tuesday Philip Langridge woke up to find himself without a voice and the Temple Song series was fortunate to produce Ian Bostridge as a replacement at the eleventh hour.

This was the opening event in the second series of Temple Song. Practical changes since last year have made Middle Temple Hall feel a more welcoming place. The spotlights have been dimmed and the acoustics seem to be better, though the lanky Bostridge naturally has a built-in advantage for reaching over the heads of the audience.

The first half of what had intended to be an all-Britten programme turned into Schubert – an advance airing of the recital that Bostridge and Julius Drake, Temple Song’s resident accompanist, are due to give in Paris next week. For all the praise that has been heaped on him, Bostridge looks and sounds an effortful interpreter of German song. The habit of singing out of the corner of his mouth has become worse, though it does not detract from the sound, and he puts the songs through a mangle in his search for deep emotions. He is at his best where the music seeks to cross into other-worldly spheres, as in the visionary images of Schubert’s “Abendbilder”.

The second half, featuring Britten items from the original programme, was more rewarding. As always, Bostridge took a personal line here, throwing body and soul into vivid vignettes of the Thomas Hardy settings that make up the song cycle Winter Words and swaying from side to side so that the audience could hear him. In Britten’s Second Canticle, Abraham and Isaac, he was joined by Iestyn Davies. Their voices were well matched and, with Drake giving the accompaniment the colours of a full orchestra, the biblical drama came operatically to life.

The Financial Times

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Reviews of 2006 Temple Song Series

London's 16th-century Middle Temple Hall is an awesome place to attend a recital; amid the panelled and stained-glass splendor …. you cannot forget that Shakespeare's Twelfth Night was first performed in this very room in 1602 ... the delightful soprano Joan Rodgers seemed to share the audience's sense of occasion in a memorable rendition of Schumann's great song-cycle Frauenliebe und-Leben.
Much credit must also go to her accompanist, Julius Drake, the mastermind behind this classy series, whose sensitiveness to his singer's needs and exquisite touch in his own solo moments combine to make him worthy of the mantle of the peerless Gerald Moore
The Observer

… to Sir Thomas Allen fell the prize trophy of Dichterliebe. In Schumann's finely integrated cycle to a series of increasingly bitter love poems by Heine. Allen's traversal of this destructive journey was charted, both vocally and with his acting skills concentrated in mutely communicative facial expressions, with supreme assurance.
The Guardian

This past winter five recitals have been given under the title “Schumann in the Temple”. It was a good idea to invite the accompanist Julius Drake to plan the programmes, as he has brought along well- known singers, including, for this last in the series, the tenor Ian Bostridge … it is good news that there will be a second series next season
The Financial Times

The Temple Music Foundation

Temple Song is partnered by the Temple Music Foundation, reg. charity no. 1095141. The Foundation works tirelessly to support and sustain the Temple Church’s outstanding choir of men and boys. The Temple Church Choir performed the world premiere of Sir John Tavener’s massive new commission, The Veil of the Temple, to great acclaim. The Choir also performed the work overnight at the Lincoln Center Festival in New York, closely followed by the BBC Proms at the Royal Albert Hall. A double CD of the shorter performance of The Veil is available on the BMG label and is proving to be a classical best seller.

Links

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