COMPOSERS: Judith Weir
LABELS: Signum
ALBUM TITLE: Weir: On Buying a Horse
WORKS: On Buying a Horse; Songs from the
Exotic; Scotch Minstrelsy; The Voice
of Desire; King Harald’s Saga;
A Spanish Liederbooklet, etc
PERFORMER: Ailish Tynan (soprano), Susan Bickley
(mezzo-soprano), Andrew Kennedy
(tenor), Iain Burnside (piano)
CATALOGUE NO: SIGCD087
Judith Weir always seems to stand,
in that lovely phrase of EM Forster
about the poet Cavafy, ‘at a slight
angle to the universe’. And that
applies conspicuously to her songs,
in which vocal lines seemingly
derived from the folk ballads of the
world and familiar-sounding piano
figures never quite cohere into the
phrases and cadences and climaxes
that they imply. But this matches the
elusive fables to which she’s drawn
for many of her texts: not for nothing
does Iain Burnside in an engaging
note call her ‘a magic realist’.
Of the three singers on this disc
from Radio 3’s ‘Voices’ series, Susan
Bickley brings off equally well the
diverse folklore of Songs from the
Exotic, the cycle The Voice of Desire
with its various prescient birds, and
the remarkable unaccompanied
King Harald’s Saga, a three-act
opera with a cast of thousands.
Andrew Kennedy’s light tenor sails
pleasingly through the dark deeds of
Scotch Minstrelsy, but Ailish Tynan
doesn’t quite catch the Iberian
inflections implicit in the vocal
TIM TRUMBLE/CHANDOS, LEBRECHT
lines of the (delightfully named)
Spanish Liederbooklet. Iain Burnside’s
piano playing is always supportive
and characterful. The recording
occasionally affords the piano more
presence than the voice, but it’s
generally clear.
Judith Weir
Judith Weir always seems to stand,
in that lovely phrase of EM Forster
about the poet Cavafy, ‘at a slight
angle to the universe’. And that
applies conspicuously to her songs,
in which vocal lines seemingly
derived from the folk ballads of the
world and familiar-sounding piano
figures never quite cohere into the
phrases and cadences and climaxes
that they imply. But this matches the
elusive fables to which she’s drawn
for many of her texts: not for nothing
does Iain Burnside in an engaging
Published: January 20, 2012 at 4:03 pm