Four Last Songs ... Vaughan Williams
Seven Early Songs ... Berg
It's a Woman ... Marian Ingoldsby
Four Songs of Farewell Op. 14 ... Korngold
Two Ballads ... Britten
In the first of two recitals under the heading of Songs of the Century the selection seems more random than representative. The hour allotted in the Sundays at Noon Series might have been better spent exploring a shorter length of time. The cycles by Berg (1905-08) and Korngold (1921) threw light on each other; further songs from that period would have been welcome.
The full-blooded romanticism of Korngold found a full-throated and enthusiastic interpreter in Colette McGahon who brought an operatic intensity to the songs without breaking the limits of the genre of recital. Similar poems, set with a much more taxing vocal line by Berg, found Kathleen Tynan in equally powerful voice but the underlying sense of strain reacted against the mood of reverie that is characteristic of the texts. These songs should be floated on the air; only then will their subtleties speak.
It is hard to regard Vaughan Williams's Four Last Songs as anything but a historical curiosity. Colette McGahon was at her best in the folk-song style of No 2.
Both singers sang in Ingoldsby's setting of a poem by Eavan Boland and Two Ballards by Britten. The accompaniment of the Ingoldsby was highly decorative and hardly matched "the low music of our outrage" that the text refers to. The first of the Ballads contains the risible line "Will you be mother comfort or shall I?"; the singers, with the help of Una Hunt at the piano, made it almost serious. The second Ballad, a setting of Auden, was a clever marriage of text and music and made a light hearted end to the recital.
