United Kingdom Thaxted Music Festival 2025 [1] – My Father’s Son: Nicky Spence (tenor), Dylan Perez (piano). Thaxted Parish Church, Essex, 22.6.2025. (CC)
‘Although this recital uses the words of others, it might as well be autobiographical,’ said Nicky Spence in an article about this very programme published in Gramophone magazine. An examination of parenthood through the eyes of two performers who have gone through this very process, this concert took in a whole range of viewpoints on matters parental, each song carefully considered in relation to the others.
The recital began with a lost boy (to be 100% accurate, a ‘boy lost’): that sense of innocence and discombobulation that surely accompanies birth. In a wonderful act of symmetry, the recital began with one lost boy (Howells’s) and ended with another (Michel Legrand’s Pieces of Dreams, subtitled, ‘Little Boy Lost’).
There was something about hearing Howells in this village church setting: as those characteristically English harmonies emerged from the piano, under Dylan Perez’s liquid touch, Howells’s poignant melodies took on extra depth. Spence projected so perfectly, scaling to the building (I was very close up and there was no discomfort from volume throughout), but it was arguably the piano’s contribution before the voice entered that was so stunning: Dylan Perez presented Howell’s opening so evenly, so perfectly judged. And when it came to the first Britten piece, ‘Midnight on the Great Western’ (subtitled, ‘The Journeying Boy’, from Winter Words, Op.52), Spence’s voice was perfect for the song’s characteristic melismas. Diction was perfect here, as everywhere – but perhaps in Britten it is particularly important due to the fluid nature of the melodies. The movement of the train is cleverly invoked via the piano; note that Spence has recorded this song in its orchestral version by Robin Greville Holloway with the London Philharmonic Orchestra and Edward Gardner. That diction extended to French, in Fauré’s beguiling ‘Les berceaux’ from the Op.23 set of Mélodies (the father’s leave-taking, in Spence’s story). The ‘idea’ of the father ‘laid to rest’ is found in one of the finest of pieces of music I have heard from the pen of Sir Michael Tippett, ‘Full Fathom Five’, the second of that composer’s Songs for Ariel (sandwiched between ’Come Unto These Yellow Sands’ and ‘Where The Bee Sucks’, sadly not on the programme). How Spence made the line ‘Ding dong bell’ count, a proper vocal tolling.
It takes a village to bring up a child, or so the saying goes. The concept is explored in a song by Buxton Orr, ‘Shy Geordie’ (from Songs of a Childhood). Orr retains the folkish aspect of the melody while adding delicate traceries on the piano. Incidentally, Orr’s Piano Trios are well worth a listen (try the Marco Polo recording with the York Piano Trio), and he wrote music for a sheaf of horror films.
My personal jury is out about Frederic Rzewski’s music. Here, we had the third of Dear Diary, ‘No Good’. The text is heart-rending though (‘What did you learn in school today?’; ‘I learned that I’m no good’); this and the next Britten feature spoken contributions from the pianist. The Rzewski is spiky harmonically and well-constructed; Britten’s ‘The Larky Lad’ was dispatched with all the aplomb it deserves: it is from Who are these children? Op.84, which Spence has recorded with Malcolm Martineau (Britten Songs, Volume 2).
After the boy rebel, the search for love, and what better than Tchaikovsky’s ‘None but the Lonely Heart’, from the Op.6 Romances, Spence and Perez conjuring up a bleak emotional canvas (and in Russian, to boot). From Russian to German for a song by Hugo Wolf: ‘Ihr sind die Allerschönste’, from Part I of the Italienisches Liederbuch, which has a sense of exaltation while occasionally skirting Schoenberg. Spence calls this song a ‘panting self-soothing love bombing … which … does wonders for the Italian tourist board’.
Time for love, and Fauré’s extraordinary ‘Donc, se sera par un clair jour d’été’, the seventh song from La bonne chanson, Op.61. Verlaine’s verse felt ecstatic here via Perez’s active contribution. A stunning performance before more Britten. The story here is of thrushes, finches, and nightingales; perhaps there should also be a stork because with all of those birds (and maybe some bees), as Libby Larsen explains in her song from the cycle The Birth Project, ’Pregnant’. The piano part mirrors the protagonist’s joy at realising that she is ‘pregnant’.
The real stroke of genius was to include a song by Victoria Wood, the comedienne. It is ‘Litter Bin’ from the album Real Life – The Songs. Two things: Spence made the song his own (in a sense, he had to: listen to the original Wood, she is absolutely inimitable). We hear more horror in Spence’s retelling of the story of the bank robbery, ‘a small man with a rifle blasts a bank clerk’s life away’. A cruel world: and it certainly is in the story of Erlkönig. Not heard through Schubert’s lens though – no, Carl Loewe. This is not an unknown song, but it is vastly eclipsed in popularity by the Schubert – there are some modern recordings, but perhaps the classic is the great Gottlob Frick with Hermann Loux. Frick, in markedly lower voice range, sings the song pretty much throughout – Spence dared to veer towards Sprechgesang at times. The characters are not quite as differentiated in the Loewe as they are in Schubert (father, son, Erlking) – in the Schubert there are defined plateaux, less so here. But it is a fascinating alternative.
The Wood, the Loewe and the two succeeding songs focus on a father’s fears (‘a level of accompanying fear reserved solely for new parents’). Britten’s ‘Septhestia’s Lullaby’ from A Charm of Lullabies, Op.41 seems to bring in another layer of spookiness, the partial harmonic resolutions perhaps hinting at the worry that happens when futures are not secure (as if they ever are). Hugo Wolf got the last word though – ‘Storchenbotschaft’ from Mörike-Lieder (The stork’s message), and a virtuoso showpiece for the piano, and not only in its final moments. Perez was supreme, as was Spence n his storytelling (the stork comes – but is it with one … or two?). It is testament to the diversity of Wolf’s output that this song is so very different from ‘Ihr seid die Allerschönste’, heard earlier.
Post-interval, and a description of the waiting (William Bolcom’s ’Waitin’ from Cabaret Songs, text Arnold Weinstein). Against beautifully played chords from Perez, Spence implied a Spiritual strongly. Then the beautiful, and very English, ‘The Cloths of Heaven’ by Thomas Dunhill (from The Wind among the Reeds) with its lovely ‘Tread softly because you tread on my dreams’; perfect. Perhaps (on disc) only Bryn Terfel, with Malcolm Martineau gets closer to the heart of this song than Spence. The sixth song from John Ireland’s Mother and Child, ‘Baby’, seemed like a lullaby prolongation of the Dunhill. Spence found a bull’s eye, too, in the outpouring of joy that is ‘An meinem Herzen’ from Frauenliebe und –leben, Op.42.
Spence now took the recital into nocturnal realms: as he puts it, ‘in MasterChef terms this would be a lullaby cooked six ways’. First, Schubert’s ever so gentle Der Vater mit seinem Kind, D.906, full of that Schubertian simplicity that drips with genius; then, an excerpt from another Robert Schumann song-cycle, Myrthen, Op.25: ‘Hochländlisches Wiegenlied’. This, the cycle’s 14th song, again boasting simplicity, could only come from Schumann’s pen.
It is quite a move to Samuel Barber, and his 1925 A Slumber Song of the Madonna (‘Sleep, little baby, I love thee’), the piano a bed of sound for Spence’s spun line. A careful progression then, from Barber to Britten (‘A Highland Balou’ from A Charm of Lullabies) and through to Mahler, and a darkening of the sparse textures of ‘Um Mitternacht’ from Rückert-Lieder (amazing how the piano version changes one’s impression of the song and makes it even starker).
Little progression, though, to André Previn and his ‘Will There Really be a Morning?’ from the 1999 Dickinson Songs, Perez’s chattering piano against Spence’s angular line. Followed by Tim Minchin’s fabulously funny Lullaby, a brief song. One more Orr (possibly the composer discovery of the day), one more train on the piano: ‘The Boy in the Train’ from Songs of a Childhood. And finally, some Michel Legrand to bring us back to the starting point, ‘Pieces of Deams (Little Boy Lost)’, which sounded for all the world as if it might morph into New York, New York at one point.
This is programming at the highest level realised by the finest executants. Intelligent the recital might be, but even for non-parents it cuts to the quick.
Colin Clarke