Brighton Year-Round 2024

St Nicholas Sylvia Akagi and Peter Golden Recital

Sylvia Akagi and Peter Golden

Genre: Live Music

Venue: St Nicholas Church, Dyke Road, Brighton

Festival: Brighton Year-Round

Low Down

Review

A rapt afternoon in shimmering heat and the chance for both heartfelt singing and cool elegance. And in times of turbulence.

It’s certainly something Sylvia Akagi and Peter Golden invoke, as they gave a vocal flute and guitar recital at St Nicholas on August 7^th. It comes at a time where the reach of folksong and its boundary-skimming ease brings us together. The origins of some songs here gave witness to that.

Golden has arranged the traditional Dark Eyes, a Russian song (and Russian is where we closed too, though we mightn’t know it). This is beautifully sung by Akagi, who with a mezzo range reaching through soprano also gives unaccompanied vocal works as in ‘Low down in the broom’ a gentle but passionately erotic piece, here as exposed solo.

The full panoply of the duo was given in Brahms’ Lullaby, written for the second child of a woman he was once in love with, but habitually held back. What Akagi who signs and Golden who accompanies on guitar manage though is a miracle of compression. Akagi also plays sections on th flute and sings some verses in English, so the full range of meaning comes through. It’s quite haunting.

Although Padraig Colum might have written the lyrics in 1909, ‘She moved through the fair’ is a traditional song that might have it roots in a Gypsy elopement. The multiple meanings of this haunting and haunted classic are as ambivalent as its origins. Sung by Golden it’s still utterly bewitching and will never yield its mystery entirely.

Back with Aakgi, Don McLean’s equally beautiful ‘Vincent’ sounds like a love lyric infinitely tender and sad, but it’s a paean to Van Gogh whose fight for sanity drove him mad, as the song says and “there’s no-one in the world as beautiful as you”.

‘Diamonds Bright’ is a song Golden has written for Akagi and again we’re here confronted with lyric regret and innocence, as again children are invoked, a contemporary lullaby probing Golden a gifted composer.

Saint-Saens’ the Swan needs no introduction, but it works in pristine miniature on Flute and Guitar. Euan McColl’s ‘The First time’ from 1957 might have been written for a bet that this most political songwriter couldn’t write a love song. But it was certainly inspired by his then lover, alter wife, Peggy Seeger. It still ranks as one of his finest and prefigures the folk revivals of the 1960s with its rise and fall tonally inflected with the folk modes of distance and enchantment faint but unmistakable.

Dusty Springfield’s brother Tom Springfield (both changed their name from O’Brien) was a songwriter. He later became a recluse and only died, aged 88, in 2022. His most famous song with Jim Dale writing the lyrics was ‘Georgie Girl’ but he wrote a string of hits, some lie this for the Seekers, with Diane Lamper. His ‘Olive tree’ is a song of endurance and Akagi gives it a timeless lift and sense of endurance, the myth too that is survived the Flood. It also brings in its memorable imagery and quit memorable song the next, written by Golden ‘Refugee’.

We never need such songs as now, as riots predicted yards away (mentioned at the end by the church). This song written to recall te lives of Syrian bookkeepers university professors librarians ad others who arrive here with nothing is heart-rending: since the Syrian refugees, we’ve had Afghans, Iraqis and Ukrainians: only the last for obvious reasons have been officially welcomed. Yet all these people need our support: and this week racism has latched on to a tragedy that has nothing to do with immigrants.

It wasn’t the song to end on though. Boris Fomin (1900-48) was the original composer pof ‘Those were the days’ which Gene Raskin Anglicised and which in 1968 was made famous by Mark Hopkin. Haunting and peculiarly Russian it’s not in fact tragic. After all the two people meet again at the end “older but no wiser”, but being mournful and Russian the song refuses the wisdom of serenity: all the better for it of course. It’s a great song to end on.

Yet the duo were dragged back. Bob Dylan’s 1997 song ‘If it could make you feel my love’ was a fine encore and a tribute to the writer who more than anyone has established folk as classic. That’s unfair on McColl, the Seegers and many others, but Dylan deserves to stand with these composers today.

Some of the church acoustics meant that Golden’s voice wasn’t given the absolute clarity it deserves, but it came out as strong as Akagi’s still crystalline delivery. A wonderful afternoon, and in its way fortuitous, necessary, and healing.

Published August 7, 2024 by Simon Jenner