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R Clarke - The Complete Songs

The Europadisc Review

R Clarke - The Complete Songs

Kitty Whately (mezzo-soprano), Nicholas Phan (tenor), Anna Tilbrook (piano), Gwenet...

£17.35

Of the various women composers whose music has attracted long overdue attention in recent years, one of the most consistently rewarding and naturally gifted is Rebecca Clarke (1886–1979). Born in Harrow to an American father and German mother, she weathered a difficult home life, studying at both the Royal Academy of Music and the Royal College of Music (where she became one of Stanford’s star composition students). Though she had to withdraw from both institutions before completing her studies, she found her niche as a professional viola playe... read more

Of the various women composers whose music has attracted long overdue attention in recent years, one of the most consistently rewarding and naturally gifted is Rebecca Clarke (1886–1979). Born in Harr... read more

R Clarke - The Complete Songs

R Clarke - The Complete Songs

Kitty Whately (mezzo-soprano), Nicholas Phan (tenor), Anna Tilbrook (piano), Gweneth Ann Rand (soprano), Roderick Williams (baritone), Max Baillie (violin), Karen Gomyo (violin), Erin Keefe (violin), Paul Neubauer (viola), Mark Kosower (cello)

Of the various women composers whose music has attracted long overdue attention in recent years, one of the most consistently rewarding and naturally gifted is Rebecca Clarke (1886–1979). Born in Harrow to an American father and German mother, she weathered a difficult home life, studying at both the Royal Academy of Music and the Royal College of Music (where she became one of Stanford’s star composition students). Though she had to withdraw from both institutions before completing her studies, she found her niche as a professional viola player – one of the most accomplished of her time. A life of touring and an at times turbulent personal life left little time for composition, and in later years her output trailed off altogether.

Today, Clarke is best known for her instrumental and chamber music, not least her celebrated Viola Sonata of 1919. During her lifetime, however, several of her songs became well known, including The Seal Man (1922) to a text by John Masefield, and The Tiger (1929–1933), a setting of William Blake’s famous poem. A handful of her songs appear with frequency on disc (recently, for example, on Golda Schultz’s album ‘This Be Her Verse’), but the vast majority are unknown. Thanks are due, then, to Signum Classics for collecting Clarke’s complete songs on a generously filled double album, with mezzo-soprano Kitty Whately, tenor Nicholas Phan and pianist Anna Tilbrook doing the honours with assistance from soprano Gweneth Ann Rand, baritone Roderick Williams and others.

What strikes the listener first is the variety of settings, with texts ranging from Shakespeare, Calderón and Goethe to Rosetti, Maeterlinck, Dehmel and Yeats. The German settings of the mid-1900s date from Clarke’s student years (her earliest song is a version of Goethe’s Wandrers Nachtlied), with contemporary texts by Richard Dehmel evidently a particular favourite. They inhabit a post-Romantic soundworld, with hints of the Impressionist influence that was to become a hallmark of Clarke’s style. Nicholas Phan’s performances are highly persuasive, even if Whately and Rand’s unisons in the duet Nacht für Nacht could be tighter. From the same period, Maeterlinck’s Chanson (sung with great warmth by Whately) also demonstrates an assured young talent.

It is, however, the English-texted settings of the 1910s and 20s that really reveal a song composer of genius. Try the limpid textures of The Cloths of Heaven (Yeats, 1927), with Phan’s sensitively shaded voice accompanied by exquisitely delicate piano figuration from Tilbrook. John Masefield’s Twilight, set in 1925, receives a gently rapt performance by Whately. Yeats’s Down by the Salley Gardens is heard in two versions, one for voice and violin (Phan and Max Baillie), the other for voice and piano (Whately and Tilbrook), demonstrating the ingenuity of Clarke’s approach to accompaniments.

Whately is extremely compelling in her performance of The Seal Man, presented in a haunting arrangement for voice, viola and piano, and she also delivers captivating accounts of the extended ballad Binnorie (from c.1941) and The Tiger, a work whose very sinews pay tribute to the years in which Clarke spent grappling with its composition (Tilbrook wrings out all the darkness she can from the moody accompaniment).

There are too many other highlights to mention here, but the gentle waltz of Oh, Dreaming World (1905) and the hilarious The Aspidistra (1929, a parody of parlour songs of the sort Clarke will have known all too well, complete with ‘wrong’ notes) both deserve mention in passing. As do two sets of arrangements from the mid-1920s, Three Old English Songs (sung by Whately) and Three Irish Country Songs (Phan), and also three atmospheric settings from 1909–10 of translations of Chinese texts, exquisitely sung by Whately. Her accounts of two Blake settings, Cradle Song (1929) and Infant Joy (c.1913) are further standouts.

Phan’s voice occasionally develops a beat at the top end of his range, but his duets with Williams, especially the John Fletcher settings Away, Delights! and the Hymn to Pan with which the album closes, are particularly enjoyable. With full texts and useful commentary from Clarke’s great-nephew Christopher Johnson, this is a finely recorded and hugely impressive release which finally gives this hitherto relatively unsung songwriter her full due.

  • Signum
  • Pentatone
  • Bru Zane
  • Chandos

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