Andrew Watts countertenor A Countertenor Songbook Andrew Watts countertenor · Iain Burnside piano 2 Andrew Watts countertenor Iain Burnside piano A Countertenor Songbook Michael Tippett Songs for Ariel 1 Come unto these yellow sands 1’54 2 Full fathom fi ve 1’44 3 Where the bee sucks 1’09 Michael Finnissy Dann nicht zu fragen 4 I 6’25 5 II 4’41 6 Joe Cutler Song for Arthur 7’18 7 Raymond Yiu Forget-Me-Not 4’36 8 Tansy Davies Song of Pure Nothingness 13’45 Neville Bower Songs of Innocence Op. 46 9 Infant Joy 1’36 bl Piping Down the Valleys Wild 3’37 bm The Lamb 3’41 bn Raymond Yiu Symphony (Intermezzo and Movement V) 5’59 Colin Matthews Un Colloque Sentimental bo I Colloque Sentimental, 1ère Partie 1’25 bp II Le Jet d’Eau 4’26 photo © Sarah Hickson © Sarah photo bq III Que diras-tu ce soir 3’53 br IV Intermezzo: Une Allée du Luxembourg 2’24 bs V Colloque Sentimental, 2ème Partie 4’52 Total timing 73’58 3 A Countertenor Songbook Typography in the sixteenth century Gershwin or Ella Fitzgerald. These too in this album there are aesthetic respectful of Shakespeare’s speech revolutionized the production and were snapshots of contemporary culture, overlaps; Andrew is omnivorous in his rhythms; in ‘Full fathom fi ve’ he seems consumption of songbooks, which though the image became slightly blurry tastes, yet the composers he invited to easily as grief stricken as poor Ariel at in Medieval Europe were beautifully as performers and publishers mined Snape Maltings in Aldeburgh, Suffolk for the reported death of Ferdinand’s father illustrated singular items. Wide previous centuries for their volumes workshops and performances of their in a shipwreck, the simple funeral march dissemination throughout Europe and recordings of Elizabethan music pieces share a similar spirit, at least in underpinned by thudding drums and highlighted different regional and or English folksong. Yet the songbook the works they have written for him. chiming bells. national styles, techniques, and principle remained: an anthology of narrative preoccupations, though certain works that speak to each other and to a Michael Tippett (1905–1998) was of Where Tippett shows contrasting slices of similarities across borders did emerge. point in history – the thinking behind the course not one of them, though these Ariel’s life without a cumulative narrative, Publishing turned oral traditions into astonishing NMC Songbook of 2009. excerpts from his Songs for Ariel slip Michael Finnissy (b. 1946) creates literary ones; what had been a shifting handily into the Songbook, not least from Georg Büchner’s Lenz a scene of A Countertenor Songbook is very much body of work was made permanent, because the ageing composer coached devastating impact. Written in 1836 yet in this tradition, though the voice type unchanging, a snapshot of a point and the emerging singer on the cycle, left uncompleted on Büchner’s death a it celebrates offers an immediate point place in history. scribbling marks into the score Andrew year later, the novella fragment relays of departure. All the works included still uses. Written in 1962 for an Old Vic the story of Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz Publishers and recording companies in are intimately connected with Andrew production of The Tempest, the songs whose mental deterioration following the twentieth century behaved much like Watts, who has been championing inhabit a world of Purcellian declamation, the abrupt ending of his friendship with the visionary Ottaviano Petrucci, who in contemporary music for the thirty years of Elizabethan fanfares that turn and Goethe shapes the narrative. Knowing Venice in the early 1500s began printing he has been singing professionally. In twist around themselves, of funeral Andrew’s voice well from other works he and selling vernacular songs. Twentieth- turn he has been championed by some dirges that allow no sense of hope. has written for him – not least the role century songbooks were a commercial of today’s most distinguished composers, proposition in an age of consumerism, all of them beguiled by his admirable These are some of Shakespeare’s most of Camille in Thérèse Raquin, produced and audiences were quick to buy their fearlessness in the face of the dense and well known and loved texts – thanks in by the Royal Opera’s Garden Venture piece of English folksong, George complex scores they produce. Naturally part to the many song settings made in 1993 – and a fi ne pianist himself, of them over the centuries. Tippett is Finnissy in Dann nicht zu fragen (Then 64 75 do not ask) conjures a dark, chocolaty Joe Cutler (b. 1968), Tansy Davies (b. is gallant, serious, old enough to be poem The Anniversary, fi rst published sonority in the middle of the piano, which 1973) and Raymond Yiu (b. 1973) all married, wise about love and war. Except in 1601, provides the material, in which winds around the voice and only gradually explore different aspects of the medieval that he isn’t quite, for in the poem a lover of one year looks forward to a moves up the compass to produce a wandering knight. Cutler’s Song for Forget-Me-Not by William McGonagall happy life together with his beloved, with ghostly descant over the title words. Arthur, to a text by his friend Martin Riley, (1830–1902) the knight’s beloved, Ellen, none of the tests and suspicions Ellen As the narrator contemplates the true is an exuberant recounting of the birth is young and foolish, which the knight introduces into her young relationship. essence of life, something beyond beauty of the future king. Using the birth of his has yet to discover. Yiu contrasts the two Yiu conjures up a beautiful pointillistic or ugliness, he identifi es Shakespeare, own son Arthur as a model, and having characters carefully: the sonorous knight texture, through which the meditation folksong and Goethe as wellsprings collaborated previously with Andrew (though with snatches of blue chords, unfolds. Not for a moment does he of humanity. Finnissy responds with during a residency at Dartington, Cutler which set up what follows) and the silly undermine the assertion or hope that the a simple, touching folksong – like packs in so much: cluster fanfares that betrothed, who demands that the knight love will be everlasting. something Schubert’s miller lad might herald the arrival of the boy and place fetch her a beautiful fl ower from the other Davies, who wrote for Andrew the part sing – before the sky clouds over once his birth in an ominous time; a thrilling side of the river, proof of his love and of the Shaman in her opera Between more. piano interlude (marked ‘Wild and fi delity. She does all this to an unabashed Worlds (2014), throws herself into the Flamboyantly’), which displays the sort of foxtrot, which is intended to underlie her Finnissy pares the texture right down in domain of the troubadour-knight, whose recklessness that Tippett managed in his superfi ciality. Of course the knight drowns his second Büchner setting, this one from role as musical storyteller would be taken fi rst piano sonata and which here sets up while swimming back with the fl ower, Woyzeck (also 1836, also uncompleted), over so handsomely by songbooks in Arthur’s fi rst hours; and a gentle lullaby at and Yiu cannot read Ellen’s desolation as in which the Grandmother tells a fairy tale the sixteenth century. Her work, Song of the end, a rapturous depiction of nature genuine: the dance continues to the end, of an orphaned child who leaves earth in Pure Nothingness, is a setting of a text and innocence and of the goodness of where it disappears in a wisp of smoke. search of love or affection, there fi nding by Guilhelm IX d’Aquitane (1071–1127) the child. ‘May this young Arthur make his the sun to be nothing but a withered The excerpt from his Symphony – who sets up the poem as a dream life his own’, the narrator and composer sunfl ower, the moon a piece of rotten Intermezzo and Movement V – which was sequence, which is his way of revealing conclude. wood. Even the stars, which Finnissy commissioned by the BBC for the Proms the narrator’s subconscious desires. colours brilliantly, betray the child, for Yiu, whom Andrew fi rst worked with in 2015 and is dedicated to Andrew and Both poet and narrator are thus able they are nothing but diseased mosquitos, on a Genesis Writing Course at Snape his husband Arjun Devanesan, is of a to hide in a murky subconscious world, their golden patina a deceit. Maltings, has chosen a knight who wholly different character. John Donne’s creating in their imaginations a beautiful 86 7 woman, punning about what they’d like The narrator in ‘Piping Down’ is a little Debussy, Ravel and Fauré. Nor does it the project, which fi nds its apotheosis, to do to her. In Davies’s reading the like that in Davies’s setting, carefully seem that Matthews necessarily wants perhaps, in this fi ne album. And we have poem is a dark, ominous contemplation writing down his songs ‘In a book that all to. In ‘Le Jet d’Eau’, the earliest of these all done our bit with great willingness and on imagined love, at once gloomy and may read’. These are simple yet telling songs, composed in 1971, his fountain affection for the musician at the centre threatening. She too incorporates a songs, composed for Andrew by his bubbles away with intense chromatic of this songbook, combining to create diffi cult piano interlude, long and ecstatic, school days’ music master, a gentle yet virtuosity, closer in spirit to Debussy’s something that reveals our different yet each fl ourish spelled differently.