Edinburgh Festival
Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh
25 August 2010
Gerald Finley (baritone)
Julius Drake (piano)
Robert Schumann: Heine settings
Maurice Ravel: Histoires naturelles
Charles Ives: Selected songs
Samuel Barber: Selected songs
To be broadcast by BBC Radio 3 on Friday 3 September at 1.00pm
Described as a baritone with a voice of ‘easy luxury’ by The New York Times, Canadian Gerald Finley performs an entertaining selection of music from Europe and the United States accompanied by pianist Julius Drake.
Schumann found great inspiration in the poetry of Heinrich Heine and Finley performs a selection of the composer’s settings including two of his finest ballads Belshazzar and The Two Grenadiers. Finley and Drake also perform Ravel’s humorous Histoires naturelles, songs by Barber including Solitary Hotel, a setting of text from Ulysses in a fast tango style, and songs by Ives including the swashbuckling Slugging a Vampire.
What the critics say
FIVE STARS
Carol Main, the Scotsman, 26 August 2010
In a generously filled programme at the Queen’s Hall yesterday morning, Gerald Finley and Julius Drake testified to the versatility of not only themselves as performers, but something of the wide range of musical material for baritone and piano.
Seriousness and Schumann go hand in hand in his settings of Heine’s burdened love poems, in marked contrast to Ravel’s playful songs about various birds and creatures, the graceful lyricism of Samuel Barber and the fun of Charles Ives.
If the opening invitation to his lover to elope came across as dogmatic, it was all tenderness thereafter as Finley took on the writer’s troubles in love. His smooth, velvety tones and ripe low notes are easy on the ear even when crescendoing in tandem with Drake to the powerfully robust fortes at the height of the poet’s passion.
At ease with himself as a performer, Finley sings with a natural confidence that is particularly advantageous to the story-telling nature of Schumann’s ballad Belsatzar and the well-known Die beiden Grenadiere. Even though diction wasn’t always completely distinct, narrative and scene-setting were ably shared with the audience, with Drake making full use of the piano part to complement Finley’s overtly expressive delivery.
Simon Thompson, Musicweb International (Seen & Heard), 27 August 2010
It is rare to find a song recital as dramatically involving as this one. Gerald Finley is already well known as a great actor on the operatic stage, but I can’t remember the last time I saw a recitalist get so involved in the drama of his songs as much as he does. True, his choice of repertoire was designed to maximise this: Schumann’s great ballads are a gift to any singing actor. But I have seldom heard Belsatzar sung with such hair-raising intensity, or the story of the Two Grenadiers told with such hell-for-leather passion. The other Heine songs he chose gave him plenty of opportunity to revel in the longing and loss that forms the other side of the Romantic poet; Tragödie’s painful beauty was a great choice for opener, and Dein Angesicht was very touching.
Ravel’s semi-comic animal cycle, Histoires naturelles, while not explicitly narrative, is packed full of opportunities for delicate character studies, from the haughty peacock to the grotesque guinea-fowl. Finley even raised some laughs from the peacock’s tale; but Julius Drake stole the limelight in the piano’s depiction of the graceful swan and the endless right-hand figurations of the busy cricket.
Finley’s baritone is richer, more aristocratic than some of his fellows on the lieder stage, and he can evoke majesty and passion more ably than most. The Barber, and especially the Ives that ended this recital pointed up the beauty in the everyday, such as the dignified beggar of West London. It was a nice – and surprising – touch, however, to end with Ives’ cod cowboy ballad Charlie Rutlage, complete with the singer’s Wild West drawl and comic timing. This recital was a remarkably complete display of what a great singer can do.
… In the Queen’s Hall it was a week for baritones, with two heavyweights, Simon Keenlyside and Gerald Finley, in two very different recitals of American and European song. … But despite the brilliance of his vocal painting, Keenlyside never appeared entirely physically comfortable on the recital stage, unlike Canadian baritone Gerald Finley.
Finley, who has an almost infinitely rich bass range, has a huge voice that he perfectly attenuates to the Queen’s Hall acoustic. His programme ranged from the delicate sensibilities of the lovers of Schumann’s Heine settings, to a brilliantly drawling eulogy of Charles Ives’ Texan cowhand in the wonderfully idiosyncratic Charlie Rutlage, via a bit of guinea fowl baiting in Ravel’s comic Histoires Naturelles.
Finley is a master storyteller, intelligent, nuanced, easy in both the serious and more comic repertoire. He sang Samuel Barber’s Solitary Hotel – a setting of text from Ulysses – with all the drama of the nosey fireside onlooker, then captured the dissonance of desperation in the same composer’s Bessy Bobtail. His fiendish Ravel showed inch-perfect grasp of French inflections, and pianist Julius Drake was excellent too, his piano chirruping nervously in The Cricket, gliding effortlessly through The Swan.
The pair encored with the wildly melodramatic The Desert, by the deservedly obscure Louis Emmanuel, which involved a bravura exposition of Emmanuel’s overblown entree by Drake whilst Finley sweltered, hammily, under the cruel sun, nervously dodging a wheeling vulture. It put a smile on my face for the rest of the week.