Leeds’s top-tier celebration of the vocal arts continues to push the envelope. Two vastly different concerts were typical of director Joseph Middleton’s determination to think outside the box while honouring the festival’s roots in the traditional recital.
Haiku, which premiered last year in Minnesota, sprang from the fertile brains of baritone Roderick Williams and pianist Iain Burnside. The roughly 90-minute programme revolved around eight poems taken from a collection of haiku written by Japanese Americans interned during the second world war. Libby Larsen’s settings – sung in both English and Japanese and collectively entitled Mobile/Not Mobile/ … – are distilled musical morsels, stuffed with imagination, exploring themes of exile, detention and deportation.
Interwoven with these lively miniatures was a variety of complementary songs drawn from Williams’ extensive repertory. Internal echoes and modern resonances threaded their way through a delicately balanced recital that proved as stimulating as it was entertaining.
The sheer sweep of the programme – from Schubert and Liszt to Britten and Poulenc – might have taxed a lesser mortal, but not master storyteller Williams who, if you’ll pardon the cliche, could breathe life into the telephone directory. His warm vocal embrace and expressive physicality brought pain and pathos, wit and wisdom to a kaleidoscopic array of songs. Burnside was his equal, a generous and supportive pianist who knows instinctively how to cast a musical halo around the voice.
Among the many highlights was Gerald Finzi’s setting of Thomas Hardy, Waiting Both, in which a man exchanges terse profundities with a gnomic star; then there were mouthwatering discoveries, including Joan Trimble’s My Grief on the Sea, a delicate Irish love song, and Elisabeth Lutyens’ sardonic setting of WH Auden’s Refugee Blues. Elsewhere, Williams brought a roustabout energy to Larsen’s ditty about white-toothed children chasing dragonflies, before capturing the hazy languor of Vaughan Williams’s Silent Noon. Maria Grever’s rumba-inflected What a Diff’rence a Day Made was the perfect laid-back note on which to end.
If Haiku remained within the bounds of the traditional recital then Dunwich, a festival commission, stretched the idea to the limit. Billed as “a song cycle without a singer”, it was created by the Leeds-based composer Martin Iddon in collaboration with pianist Rei Nakamura, speaker Gillian Jane Lees and videographer Adam York Gregory.
The piece is named for East Anglia’s famous “lost city”, a once-thriving medieval seaport that was gradually swallowed up by the North Sea. A haunting soundscape combined field recordings made at the site of Dunwich’s last remaining gravestone with Iddon’s shape-shifting writing for piano, a score that hovered on the edge of conventional tonality, whispering of bells, folk song, hymnody and the sea.
Over these aural shifting sands, Lees delivered slyly sinister accounts of local ghost stories, tales of abandoned maidens, bells tolling beneath the waves and Black Shuck, a demonic hound that haunts the East Anglian coast. Gregory’s eerie black-and-white videos of Dunwich and its environs featured forbidding seas and the traces of sped-up figures flitting restlessly like shadowy will-o’-the-wisps. Evocative fare.
• Leeds Song festival continues until 18 April 2026.
