CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
Bryn Terfel
Malcolm Martineau

Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage
Friday, April 25th, 2008 at 8:00 PM

Bryn Terfel, Bass-Baritone
Malcolm Martineau, Piano

IRELAND "Sea Fever"
IRELAND "Vagabond"
IRELAND "The Bells of San Marie"
WARLOCK "Captain Stratton's Fancy"
KEEL Three Salt-Water Ballads
·· Port of Many Ships
·· Trade Winds
·· Mother Carey
VAUGHAN WILLIAMS "The Roadside Fire"
VAUGHAN WILLIAMS "Silent Noon"
QUILTER "Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal," Op. 3, No. 2
QUILTER "Weep You No More, Sad Fountains," Op. 12, No. 1
QUILTER "Go, Lovely Rose," Op. 24, No. 3
QUILTER "Fair House of Joy," Op. 12, No. 7
HANDEL "Si tra i ceppi e le ritorte" from Berenice, regina d’Egitto
MOZART "Io ti Lascio, oh cara, addio," K. 245/621a
SCHUBERT FRANZ SCHUBERT "Liebesbotschaft" from Schwanengesang, D. 957, No. 1
SCHUBERT "Heidenröslein," D.257
SCHUBERT "Litanei auf das Fest aller Seelen," D.343
SCHUBERT "An Sylvia," D. 891
FAURÉ "Automne," Op. 18, No. 3
FAURÉ "Le secret," Op. 23, No. 3
FAURÉ "Fleur jetée," Op. 39, No. 2
TRADITIONAL Songs from the Celtic Isles
·· Loch Lomond
·· Passing By
·· Cariad cyntaf
·· Danny Boy
·· Ar hyd y nos
·· Molly Malone

Encores:
ALMA BAZEL ANDROZZO "If I Can Help Somebody" (arr. Zalva)
MOZART "Deh vieni alla finestra" from Don Giovanni
OWEN WILLIAMS "Sûl y Blodau"

Sponsored by Ernst & Young LLP

Program Notes:

By Susan Youens

JOHN IRELAND “Sea Fever,” “Vagabond,” and “The Bells of San Marie”
Born August 13, 1879, in Bowdon, England; died June 12, 1962, in Sussex.

Mention John Masefield’s name, and someone in the room will surely quote the opening lines of “Sea-Fever”: “I must down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky, / And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by.” Masefield’s reputation has had its ups and downs, given his lifelong loyalty to an Edwardian aesthetic that came to an end on the battlefields of World War I, but in the early 20th century, he was famous for creating a new poetic voice in the Salt Water Ballads of 1902, written in six weeks when Masefield was 24 years old, and the Ballads and Poems of 1903. At age 13, he was sent to work on a ship and remained at sea until April 1895, when he fell in love with New York City and left the seafaring life for good (he returned to England on July 4, 1897). In his early poems, we hear the voices of common sailors working on the soon-to-be archaic square-rigged sailing ships, soon to be replaced by what Masefield called the “dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack.” His first two collections of lyric verse were like catnip for composers, including John Ireland, whose setting of Masefield’s “Sea Fever” was his most immediate and lasting success. If Masefield’s poem begins as something feverish, urgent, and restless, Ireland’s setting is more somber and reflective, perhaps shaped by the desire at the close for “quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over” (a “trick” is nothing salacious, but rather a turn at the wheel). “The Vagabond” is a tramp’s repudiation of philosophy—don’t know, don’t care about the “big imponderables”—for the lived experience of the wayfaring life. In “The Bells of San Marie,” Ireland was interested not so much in melodic chiming but in the overtones that enshroud bell sounds in rich dissonance, duplicated here harmonically.


PETER WARLOCK “Captain Stratton’s Fancy”
Born October 30, 1894, in London; died there December 17, 1933.

Philip Heseltine’s pseudonym “Peter Warlock” hints at eccentricity on the part of someone deeply interested in the occult. He was a friend of D. H. Lawrence until their rift over the manuscript of Women in Love, in which the composer and his wife, nicknamed “Puma,” were unflatteringly portrayed; Lawrence revised the offending passages. Warlock’s style in other songs was influenced by early music and by Bartók and Stravinsky, but “Captain Stratton’s Fancy” bespeaks the Warlock who went roistering in pubs and taverns. A compound of sailor’s song and drinking song, its persona heartily praises rum over any other tipple, especially tepid tea.


FREDERICK KEEL Three Salt-Water Ballads
Born 1871; died 1954.

The singer-songwriter Frederick Keel was influenced both by Elizabethan song (he published two volumes of songs by Dowland, Morley, and others in his own arrangements) and English folk song, as we can hear in his Three Salt-Water Ballads. The “Port of Many Ships” is a nautical vision of Heaven as a harbor where the rum flows freely, the breezes are light, the sunken ships return to port, and the drowned sailors sing; each verse ends with the persona’s wistful wish that he was already there. “Trade Winds” paints the picture of an earthly paradise: a harbor in the “Spanish seas,” where the gentle trade winds blow, their hypnotic crooning and swaying mimicked in voice and piano alike. “Mother Carey”—Masefield’s subtitle is “(As told me by the Bo’sun)”—is neither wistful nor gentle: this sailor sings of the witch Mother Carey, adorned with barnacles and sharks’ teeth, and her mate Davy Jones with the proper mixture of dread and respect born of long experience.


RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS “The Roadside Fire” and “Silent Noon”
Born October 12, 1872, in Down Ampney, Gloucestershire; died August 26, 1958, in London.

“The Roadside Fire” is the third song in Ralph Vaughan Williams’s early cycle, Songs of Travel, on texts from Robert Louis Stevenson’s poetic anthology of the same title, compiled the year before his death. The song begins with bustling animation to tell of love’s vitality and then broadens out in the final stanza, where love engenders music for the two lovers only (and for all of us). Stevenson’s own words, “the rare song to hear,” perfectly describe this work. Another early song cycle by Vaughan Williams is The House of Life, six songs on texts from Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s 101 sonnets of the same title. Here, the poet-painter traces the course of an intimate relationship, seeking with each sonnet to create a “moment’s monument” to his love for his dead first wife, Elizabeth Siddal, and his infatuation with Jane Morris, the wife of his Pre-Raphaelite fellow-artist William Morris. In sonnet 19, “Silent Noon,” the persona captures in words the spiritual communion between lovers in the midst of summer’s beauty, a communion that goes beyond the physical raptures celebrated elsewhere in the anthology. We can hear the influence of Brahms (Intermezzo in E-flat Major, Op. 117, No. 2, in the middle section) and also Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde: hardly shabby choices of works to imprint themselves on the mind of a young composer.


ROGER QUILTER “Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal,” Op. 3, No. 2; “Weep You No More, Sad Fountains,” Op. 12, No. 1; “Go, Lovely Rose,” Op. 24, No. 3; and “Fair House of Joy,”Op. 12, No. 7
Born November 1, 1877, in Hove; died September 21, 1953, in London.

The first half ends with a group of songs by Roger Quilter, who transformed the music hall ballads and drawing room songs of the day to give them new depth and refinement, owing in part to four-and-a-half years of study in Germany and the influence of Gabriel Fauré’s music. “Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal” is a setting of a bowdlerized version of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s love-poem (this is Quilter’s only Tennyson song). Those attuned to rhythmic subtleties might notice that the majority of each poetic line / vocal phrase unfurls in an unusual 5/4 meter, with the bridging passages in the piano set in 3/4; something of the rapt beauty of this song is due to this metrical play. Late 19th- and early 20th-century British composers were often drawn to the texts of Elizabethan and Jacobean lute song; we already know the words of “Weep You No More, Sad Fountains” from its immortal setting by John Dowland. Here, it is brought back in the musical garb of a later age by Quilter; the way in which the singer’s part and the counter-melody in the right hand cross over and under each other is among the felicities of this beautiful song. The text of “Go, Lovely Rose” is a variation on the antique carpe diem theme by the 17th-century Royalist poet Edmund Waller (diplomatically, he also wrote a panegyric to Cromwell before the Restoration made him safe). In “Fair House Of Joy,” an unknown Elizabethan gallant “fain would change that note” and sing of something other than love, but because nothing is sweeter than its “rich fruit,” he ends with an ecstatic paean to Love’s house of bliss.


GEORGE FRIDERIC HANDEL “Si tra i ceppi e le ritorte”
Born February 23, 1685, in Halle; died April 14, 1759, in London.
WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART “Io ti lascio, o cara, addio,” K. 245/621a
Born January 27, 1756, in Salzburg, Austria; died December 5, 1791, in Vienna.

The second half of the program begins with a trip back in time to the 18th century. Handel’s opera Berenice, regina d’Egitto (Berenice, Queen of Egypt)—based on the life of Cleopatra Berenice, the daughter of Ptolemy IX (the main character in Handel’s 1728 opera Tolomeo)—was composed at a time when the pragmatic composer could see that British tastes were beginning to turn away from Italian opera. But the redoubtable Handel remained faithful to his preferred genre as long as he could, driving himself so hard that he collapsed with a stroke five days before the premiere of Berenice. The opera was not a success, but the aria “Si tra i ceppi e le ritorte” is, especially as performed by tonight’s artists; in the opera, the character Demetrius sings it to reassure his beloved Selene of his constant love, even as her jealous sister, the queen of Egypt, is sending him to prison. The aria, “Io ti lascio, o cara, addio,” was possibly composed in the summer of 1791, only a few months before Mozart’s death, and is a collaborative endeavor with his good friend Gottfried von Jacquin, a fine amateur bass who seems to have shared Mozart’s zany wit, judging from their letters. Jacquin probably supplied the vocal line and bass and Mozart the three upper string parts. The text was taken from a 1776 opera by Giovanni Paisiello; in Mozart’s setting, it is a father’s plangent farewell to his daughter.


FRANZ SCHUBERT “Liebesbotschaft,” from Schwanengesang, D. 957, No. 1;
“Heidenröslein,” D. 257; “Litanei auf das Fest aller Seelen,” D. 343; and “An Sylvia,” D. 891
Born January 31, 1797, in Vienna; died there November 19, 1828.

Seven of the 10 poems by the Berlin poet-critic-musician Ludwig Rellstab were included in the compilation Schwanengesang (“Swan Song”), published in Vienna in 1829—after Schubert’s tragically early death on November 19, 1828. This first song in the Rellstab group is the last of Schubert’s “water music” songs; here, a lover softly begs the rushing waters of the brook to carry messages of love to the distant beloved. In Schubert’s vivid harmonic imagination, we hear the persona’s doubts and trace-elements of melancholy as well as ardor. With “Heidenröslein,” Goethe, sometime before June 1771, did the near-impossible: he wrote a “folk poem,” a parody (in the sense of a variation on a prior model) of the traditional children’s song, “Es sah ein Knab’ ein Röslein stehen.” In the midst of his so-called “miracle year” of song (1815), when he was seemingly drunk on poetry, Schubert subsequently turned this strophic poem about rape into a “Lied im Volkston,” a song that imitates folksong style to perfection. “Litanei auf das Fest aller Seelen” is a “geistliche Lied,” a spiritual song whose poetic persona prays for the souls of saints and sinners alike: soldiers dead in battle, martyrs for faith, abandoned women who killed themselves, the elderly, new-born infants, in sum, all of humanity. Schubert once wrote to his father and stepmother, “I never force myself to be devout, and never compose hymns or prayers of that sort [he was talking about the ever-popular “Ave Maria,” or “Ellens Gesang III”] except when the mood takes me, but then it is usually the right and true devotion.” In June 1816, shortly before composing “Litanei,” Schubert wrote in his diary some tender thoughts about his dead mother Elizabeth Vietz, thoughts that came to him as he was walking through the Währing Cemetery where she was buried (it would be his initial burial site as well). No wonder this song is so lovely. Shakespeare is among Schubert’s 100 or so poets, if only for three songs composed in July 1826, when Schubert and his friend Franz von Schober were on holiday in the village of Währing. The text for “An Sylvia” comes from The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Act IV, Scene 2, translated into German by Schubert’s friend Eduard von Bauernfeld. Shakespeare’s Sylvia—the daughter of the Duke of Milan—is pursued both by the foolish Thurio (her father’s choice) and Valentine, the man she truly loves. For this serenade, sung before the comedy’s complications have reached their dénouement, Schubert created one of his most endearing songs. The dotted rhythms on the fourth beat of the measure give this song of devotion a bit of steely strength and vital energy, while the marvelous leap into the empyrean at the end of each verse is another darling detail by which love is made musically perfect.


GABRIEL FAURÉ “Automne,” Op. 18, No. 3; “Le secret,” Op. 23, No. 3; and”Fleur jetée,” Op. 39, No. 2
Born May 12, 1845, in Pamiers, Ariège; died November 4, 1924, in Paris.

Gabriel Fauré’s patrician, profound aesthetic is one of the glories of French song. Some 60 songs were published in three recueils, or collections, of 20 songs each (with four late cycles to follow), and tonight’s program includes three songs from the second volume, all on poems by Paul-Armand Silvestre, one of the so-called Parnassian poets (they espoused technical perfection, precise description, objectivity, and restraint in reaction to Romantic verse) in late 19th-century France. “Automne” is a darkly brooding autumnal meditation on the bygone springtime of life; the brief excursion into harmonic sweetness at the recollection of smiling youth, a memory which then slips quickly and inevitably back into the prevailing climate of grief and loss, is Fauré to the hilt. “Le secret” is a solemn hymn to love, told and untold (the poem’s title is “Mystère,” or Mystery), at morning, night, dawn, day, and sunset; the delicacy of the two-bar interludes for the piano are part of this song’s magic. Musicians looking at the page will love the fact that the clustered flats for the adoration kept secret from morning turn into sharps for the day that proclaims that self-same worship of the beloved. “Fleur jetée” is sometimes compared to Schubert’s “Erlkönig” because of the repeated octaves and pounding chords in the piano, filling the air with a sound-and-fury that is atypical for Fauré but irresistible in its drama; we are swept along without cessation or pause “au gré du vent,” the “wind” in this instance being Fauré’s inimitable way with harmony.


TRADITIONAL “Loch Lomond,” “Passing By,” “Cariad Cyntaf,” “Danny Boy,” “Ar hyd y nos,” and “Molly Malone”

Bryn Terfel is one of the foremost advocates of the traditional music of Ireland, Scotland, England, and, most of all, his native Wales. The final group of songs begins with a familiar tune whose history may be unfamiliar to some: “Loch Lomond,” named after one the largest lochs in Great Britain, northwest of Glasgow. Some have attributed this song to an unknown Jacobite Highlander, captured along with his brother after the uprising of Bonnie Prince Charlie—Charles Edward Stuart (1720–1788), the exiled claimant to the thrones of England, Scotland, and Ireland—in 1745 and condemned to death. Before the execution, the older brother bids the guard kill him at midnight in exchange for his younger brother’s life; in this reading, the “low road” is the tunnel that Celtic fairies supposedly dug so that the souls of those who died away from their homeland might return home. In another reading, the song is sung by the lover of a captured rebel sentenced to execution in London; the rebels’ heads were displayed on pikes along the “high road” (the most important path), while their grieving relatives traveled the “low road” of peasants and commoners. The text of “Passing By” is surely familiar to many: it comes from The Hesperides, a collection of some 1,200 poems by another 17th-century Royalist poet (better known than Waller), Robert Herrick, whom Algernon Charles Swinburne called “the greatest song-writer ever born of English race.” This darling poem is typical of his coup de foudre / love-at-first-sight celebrations of all things amorous. “Cariad Cyntaf” is a traditional Welsh song in which a love-sick swain pleads with his “bright star” for a rendezvous; words and melody both hint at success for his amatory entreaty. The melody of “Danny Boy” comes from one place, the words from another. Its tune is the “Londonderry Air,” named after the northern Irish county where its discoverer lived and first published by the Society for the Preservation and Publication of the Melodies of Ireland in their 1855 compilation, The Ancient Music of Ireland. In 2000 a scholar demonstrated that part of the melody derived from a refrain in the traditional song, “Aislean an Oigfear” (“The young man’s dream”). The words were originally written in 1910 to a different melody, text and music alike created by Frederick Weatherly, an English lawyer who never even visited Ireland. His own tune was not a success, so Weatherly modified the lyrics in 1912 to fit the “Londonderry Air.” And finally, we end with one of the world’s most tender nocturnes: “Ar Hyd y Nos.” The melody of this Welsh folk song was first printed in Edward Jones’s Musical and Poetical Relics of the Welsh Bards in 1784; the words we hear tonight were written by John Ceiriog Hughes, a Welsh poet and folk song collector who became famous in the 1850s (“Ceiriog” is his bardic name, from the River Ceiriog in the Ceiriog Valley of northeast Wales where Hughes was born). Many in the audience will know it as “All Through the Night” in an English translation by Sir Harold Boulton (1859–1935). And finally, we end with “Molly Malone,” a popular song that has acquired the status of an Irish anthem. Visitors to Dublin might be familiar with Jeanne Rynhart’s statue at the bottom of Grafton Street, a sculpture fashioned for the Dublin Millenium of 1988 and popularly, if somewhat rudely, known as “The Tart with the Cart,” “The Dish with the Fish,” or “The Trollop with the Scallops.” Despite various attempts to assert the existence of a real Molly Malone in late 17th-century Dublin, she is probably pure fiction, a type rather than an actual person—her song is not even traditional, except insofar as the Irish have naturalized it. It was first published in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1883 and then in London the next year, the latter version with an attribution to an Edinburgh composer named James Yorkston (not the star of the rock group called “The Athletics”).


Copyright © 2008 by The Carnegie Hall Corporation

Susan Youens is author of several books on song, including Schubert’s Late Lieder: Beyond the Song Cycles (Cambridge University Press, 2002) and Hugo Wolf and His Mörike Songs (Cambridge University Press, 2000).

Bryn Terfel, Bass-Baritone
The Welsh bass-baritone Bryn Terfel rose to prominence when he won the Lieder Prize in the 1989 Cardiff Singer of the World Competition. In 2003, Mr. Terfel was awarded a CBE for services to opera in the Queen’s New Year Honors list and received the Queen’s Medal for Music in 2006. He is also the last recipient of the Shakespeare Prize by the Alfred Toepfer Foundation, Hamburg.

He has performed in all the great opera houses of the world, and is especially recognized for his portrayals of Figaro and Falstaff. Other roles include Wotan in Das Rheingold and Die Walküre, Holländer in Der fliegende Holländer, Méphistophélès in Faust, both the title role and Leporello in Don Giovanni, Jochanaan in Salome, Scarpia in Tosca for Royal Opera House, Nick Shadow in The Rake’s Progress, Wolfram in Tannhäuser, Balstrode in Peter Grimes, Four Villains in Les contes d’Hoffmann, Dulcamara in L’elisir d’amore and the Title Role in Sweeney Todd.

Mr. Tefel is also known for his versatility as a concert performer, with highlights ranging from the opening ceremony of the Wales Millennium Centre to Last Night of the Proms and the Royal Variety Show. He has given recitals in the major cities of the world and hosts his own festival every year in Faenol, North Wales.

He is a Grammy, Classical Brit, and Gramophone Award winner with a discography encompassing operas of Mozart, Wagner, and Strauss, as well as more than 10 solo discs including Lieder, American musical theater, Welsh songs, and sacred repertory.

In 2007 Mr. Terfel added the title-role in Gianni Schicchi to his repertoire, performing it at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. He also sang the title role in concert performances of Sweeney Todd as part of the reopening of the Royal Festival Hall (London) and gave his last performance in the role of Figaro in Le nozze di Figaro at the Metropolitan Opera (New York).

Highlights in 2008 include his return to Welsh National Opera in the title role in Falstaff, recitals in the Concertgebouw (Amsterdam), Wigmore Hall (London); a recital tour of North America; and concerts in Denmark, Germany, Gran Canaria, as well as a tour of Scandinavia.

Mr. Terfel is pleased to have an association with several companies, most notably Rolex, Clogau Gold, and the Penderyn Distillery.

Malcolm Martineau, Piano
Recognized as one of leading accompanists of his generation, Malcolm Martineau has worked with many of the world’s greatest singers, including Sir Thomas Allen, Dame Janet Baker, Olaf Bär, Barbara Bonney, Ian Bostridge, Angela Gheorghiu, Susan Graham, Thomas Hampson, Della Jones, Simon Keenlyside, Magdalena Kožená , Solveig Kringelborn, Jonathan Lemalu, Dame Felicity Lott, Christopher Maltman, Karita Mattila, Lisa Milne, Ann Murray, Anna Netrebko, Anne Sofie von Otter, Joan Rodgers, Amanda Roocroft, Michael Schade, Frederica von Stade, Bryn Terfel, and Sarah Walker.

He has presented his own series at St. John’s Smith Square (the complete songs of Debussy and Poulenc), Wigmore Hall (a Britten series broadcast by the BBC), and at the Edinburgh Festival (the complete lieder of Hugo Wolf). He has appeared throughout Europe (including London’s Wigmore Hall, Barbican, Queen Elizabeth Hall, and Royal Opera House; La Scala in Milan; Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris; Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona; Berlin’s Philharmonie and Konzerthaus; Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw; and the Vienna Konzerthaus and Musikverein), North America (including both Carnegie Hall and Alice Tully Hall in New York), Australia (including the Sydney Opera House), and at the Aix-en-Provence, Vienna, Edinburgh, Schubertiade, Munich, and Salzburg festivals. Current and forthcoming engagements include an international recital tour with Magdalena Kožená , a US recital tour with Susan Graham, and his own French song series at Wigmore Hall.

Recording projects have included Schubert, Schumann, and English song recitals with Bryn Terfel (Deutsche Grammophon); Schubert and Strauss recitals with Simon Keenlyside (EMI); recital records with Angela Gheorghiu and Barbara Bonney (Decca), Magdalena Kožená (DG), and Della Jones (Chandos); the complete Fauré songs with Sarah Walker and Tom Krause; the complete Britten folk songs (Hyperion), and the complete Beethoven folk songs (DG).

Born in Edinburgh, Mr. Martineau studied at St. Catharine’s College (Cambridge) and the Royal College of Music. He was a given an honorary doctorate at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in 2004.