Brighton Year-Round 2025
Sussex Musicians Club January 15th 2025
Sussex Musicians Club

Genre: Live Music, Music
Venue: Chapel Royal, North Road Brighton
Festival: Brighton Year-Round
Low Down
Mezzo Pamela Cross with Celia Vince gave a predominantly classical recital. Ben Alexander and Hugh O’Neill offer something unusual. A single movement from a work: Lalo’s Cello Concerto in D minor. Schumann ‘s Dichterliebe Op.48 date from 1840 his Year of Song; 130 of them inspired by his marriage to Clara Wieck. Baritone Simon Madge and pianist Stephen Engelhard have selected 11 songs, around two thirds of what Schumann set of Heinrich Heine’s great poems. The best known are there.
A very fine recital.
Review
Paradoxically a January concert proved rather full whereas the Christmas attendance was sparse. Despite the mince pies.
And that’s also despite only three sets of artists were on the almost completely vocal programme.
First up was mezzo Pamela Cross with Celia Vince in a predominantly classical recital. First Handel’s ‘Cara Sposa’ from his first London hit Rinaldo from 1712. Vince draws out the longing of the accompaniment as Cross with a naturally low lying mezzo voice mediates on the obsessive rhythms that don’t sound so far from his great ‘Scherzo Infida’ from Ariodante in 1735. But it also looks back to Dido’s Lament from around 1684. Handel was careful to cultivate some British models. But then Purcell pursued the Italian from where Handel had just come.
It’s striking to hear to hear Massenet in a piano reduction. Werther’s ‘Va, Laisse couler nes larmes’, from the eponymous opera; which is melodically more interesting when presented like this.
Mozart’s Countess from The Marriage of Figaro lamenting infidelity in ‘Porfi, amor’ is dispatched with power and decision.
Handel returns with his 1718 Acis and Galatea. Lamenting Acid’s death at the he hands of giant Polythemus, Galatea can only transform her dead lover into a stream… The consolatory upbeat nature of this pristine aria from one of Handel’s brightest scores is a wonder. ‘Heart, the seat of soft delight’ still involved sensual and sexual love whilst accepting its passing. Cross evokes its delicacy.
Suddenly with contemporary Frank Wildhorn (born 1958) and his Scarlet Pimpernel. ‘When I Look at You’ when Cross blossoms in this delightful piece of recent musical theatre. Both soaring and consolatory, it’s touching and a bit magical in Vince’s pianism too.
Ben Alexander and Hugh O’Neill offer something unusual. A single movement from a work, and Lalo’s Cello Concerto in D minor isn’t one of the most famous concertos, but is pretty well known. Written in 1876 it comes after the composer’s famous Sinfonie Espagnole and is similarly infected with Spanish rhythms. O’Neill is warmly supportive and emphatic
Alexander’s warm deep sound plumbs the melodic line and harmonic depths that make you listen again for subtlety in this work. And indeed it’s dramatic force. It builds up to an impressive perforation from Alexander, with great chiming chords from O’Neill.
Schumann ‘s Dichterliebe Op.48 date from 1840 his Year of Song; 130 of them inspired by his marriage to Clara Wieck. Baritone Simon Madge and pianist Stephen Engelhard have selected 11 songs, around two thirds of what Schumann set of Heinrich Heine’s great poems. The best known are there.
In the Month of May (I’m not going to transliterate that much German!) shows off Madge’s warm baritonal timbre and diction. After the second song about tears the third ‘The rose the lily and the sun’s a scherzo of sexual excitement is one of the best known.. The fourth ‘When I look into your eyes’ is another brief transitional piece leading to ‘I want to plunge my soul’ one of the best known too and where Madge is really warmed up. As he does drawing on a bass baritonal range in Poem 11 or XI ‘In the Rhine’ an ominous opening the cycle and in the composer’s life.
Poem XVIII or 18 ‘Ich Grolle Nicht’ or ‘I bear no grudge’s is probably the finest of all in Dichterliebe. With it’s heroic renunciation and lyric backwash countering this, it’s a great song and Madge really bites into it.
Poem XXII or 22 a s the most lyrical since I and sound out into its world rapidly and with dissonances too that suggest a later age. As does Poem XL (40):I hear the little song sounding futurity. Schumann reverses to XXXIX(39) in a curiously perky upbeat work showing agility in both performers. Finally XLV (45) ‘On a shining summer morning’ furnished a suitably valedictory note, spent in wonder and the dim consolation of nature. A very fine recital.