Among the plethora of female composers finally receiving their due in recent years, Rebecca Clarke stands out for sheer quality and consistency of inspiration. Born in 1886, she studied with Stanford, worked with Vaughan Williams and, as a virtuoso violist, became one of the first professional female orchestral players in London. Relocating to the United States, her output declined, but her spirited chamber music and more recently her rediscovered songs, have proved fertile ground for today’s performers.
In a deftly curated programme, the culmination of a Wigmore Hall Clarke study day, youthful compositions rubbed shoulders with music from her most productive period, the 1920s. Ailish Tynan opened proceedings, her soaring soprano and snappy diction illuminating songs that suggested the influence of Vaughan Williams. Ravel, in Orientalist mode, hovered over settings of Chinese poetry, perfect material for Kitty Whately’s fresh, flaming mezzo-soprano with its cushioned lower register. Ashley Riches’ warm baritone embraced Clarke’s memorable melody for Yeats’ Down by the Salley Gardens while raising a smile in The Aspidistra, a melodramatic song about the calculated murder of a pot plant.
American tenor Nicholas Phan lent his bright, lyric instrument and an expressive stillness to a handful of early German songs and brought an understated sensuality to The Cherry-Blossom Wand (Clarke once described the dividing line between music and sex as “so tenuous as to be almost non-existent”). Max Baillie was a sensitive guide to the masterly viola sonata, plunging into the heady waters of the rhapsodic outer movements and relishing the jiggery-pokery of the fleet-footed central scherzo. Anna Tilbrook was a poetic and authoritative guide throughout. Not every composition here was of purest gold, but the hit rate was remarkably high.
Clarke’s best-known song is The Seal Man, a John Masefield setting in which a young woman is drawn to her death by a mysterious figure from out of the sea. Performed in a new arrangement for voice, piano and viola, Whately was spellbinding. Tynan, a singer in her absolute prime, was a hard act to beat, however. Accompanied by Baillie on violin, she brought delicacy, wit and an idiomatic tang to the scintillating Three Irish Country Songs.
