Gerald Finley, BBC Radio 3 “Performance on 3”

5 October 2009

Gerry being interviewed about the concert at the Barbican on 3 October 2009.

Programme presented by Petroc Trelawny

PT: …Now one of the draws for Saturday’s concert was the presence of Gerald Finley. The Canadian bass-baritone sang Musorgsky, and first Mahler, songs from Des Knaben Wunderhorn, four of the twelve settings that Mahler created for voice and orchestra between 1892 and 1901. The texts were folk poems published nearly a century earlier, cherished as a symbol of the old in a Germanyundergoing the radical change of Industrial revolution. We start with Earthly Life, a starving child begging its mother for food, by the time the bread is baked the child is on its funeral bier. Then comes Anthony of Padua’s Sermon to the Fish; Where the fine trumpets sound sees an encounter between a girl and the ghost of her soldier sweetheart, and finally there’s a little humour in In Praise of High Intellect” there’s a swipe at hostile critics and a donkey that finds cuckoo’s singing more alluring to that of the nightingale. Gerald Finley…

GF: The thing about the Mahler songs from Des Knaben Wunderhorn is that they were conceived both as songs for piano and separately as songs with orchestra. in the orchestra, Mahler took his time in the summer of 1899 or 1900 to really colour the songs with his beautiful instrumentation, and the instrumentation is very bare but again they’re very evocative, wonderful colours using individual instruments really for putting them against each other. Wo die Schoenen Trompeten blasen has this glorious call of the trumpet in the distance as if in a dream, and although you could get that effect with the piano of course with a real trumpet, it’s absolutely magical…

Concert: Gustav Mahler: Songs from Des Knaben Wunderhorn

Das Irdische Leben (Earthly Life)

Des Antonius von Padua Fischpredigt (Anthony of Padua’s Sermon to the Fish)

Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen (Where the fine trumpets sound)

Lob des hohen Verstandes (In Praise of High Intellect)

PT: …Well immediately after the interval Gerald Finley returned to the stage to sing Musorgsky’s Songs and Dances of Death with accompaniment orchestrated by Shostakovich. As with the Mahler we start with a dead child, a song called Lullaby. Then in Serenade, death is a mock-gallant knight serenading an invalid girl, there’s a blood-curdling cry at the end as death cries out “You are mine!”. In Trepak, she – death being feminine in Russian – lures a drunken peasant through a storm to an enticing grave. And finally in The Field-Marshall the din of battle dies to reveal the commander in chief, the Grim Reaper. Well Musorgsky set these songs in the mid 1870s, 90 years later Shostakovich orchestrated them, paving the way for his own songs of death, the words of the 14th Symphony

GF: Well of course the most beautiful thing about the Musorgsky songs is that they are very dark songs in Dances of Death, and yet they are extremely full of love and compassion. Death is very much a companion to each of the scenes. Death is seen as a comforter of a child, of someone who’s disabled, of an old drunken man in a snowstorm doing a Trepak dance, and really trying to wrestle these people from the final miseries of life. In the final song, the big battle scene, he’s invoking the horror of the troops that are lying dead on the ground and he says “I will make sure you are remembered”. So they’re actually very positive songs, the caressing of death, the soothing of death, and if you like, the memory of people who have gone through it.

Concert: Modest Musorgsky: Songs and Dances of Death

Lullaby

Serenade

Trepak

The Field Marshall

PT: The Songs and Dances of Death by Musorgsky orchestrated by Shostakovich sung by Gerald Finley, Jiří Bělohlávek conducted the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Barbican on Saturday.

Well Gerald Finley celebrating on Saturday because that day he won the Gramophone award for Solo Vocal for his and Julius Drake’s disc of Schumann Heine settings, second year in a row for this partnership following their win in 2008 for Songs by Samuel Barber. Both discs on the Hyperion label. This month sees Gerald Finley sing Elijah with the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande in Lausanne andGeneva and the beginning of recitals with Julius Drake in Brussels and The Hague