The Ballad Singer

“Finley lives up to his reputation … with an impressive dramatic acuity that elevates the finest singers above the rest of their colleagues.” The Whole Note

“Finley is a fine tale-teller” “Drake is a fine accomplice” BBC Music Magazine

“As these pages have said before, it’s a great partnership.” Gramophone

Performers:

Gerald Finley
Julius Drake

Label: Hyperion,CDA67830
Recording date: February 2010
Recording venue:All Saints, Durham Road, East Finchley, London, United Kingdom
Produced by Mark Brown
Engineered by Julian Millard
Release date: June 2011

Tracklisting

1 Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827):
Aus Goethes Faust, Op 75 No 3. Es war einmal ein König [2'16]

2 Carl Loewe (1796-1869):
Edward, Op 1 No 1. Dein Schwert, wie ist’s von Blut so rot? [6'38]

3 Carl Loewe (1796-1869):
Die wandelnde Glocke, Op 20 No 3. Es war ein Kind, das wollte nie [2'02]

4 Franz Peter Schubert (1797-1828):
Erlkönig, D328. Wer reitet so spät durch Nacht und Wind? [4'22]

5 Robert Schumann (1810-1856): Drei Gesänge, Op 31 No 1
Die Löwenbraut. Mit der Myrte geschmückt und dem Brautgeschmeid [9'24]

6 Robert Schumann (1810-1856): Romanzen und Balladen I, Op 45
No 1: Der Schatzgräber. Wenn alle Wälder schliefen [3'21]

7 Anonymous – traditional, arr. Johannes Brahms (1833-1897): 49 Deutsche Volkslieder, WoO33
No 29: Es war ein Markgraf überm Rhein [3'31]

8 Hugo Wolf (1860-1903):
No 44: Der Feuerreiter. Sehet ihr am Fensterlein [5'44]

9 Gustav Mahler (1860-1911):
Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen. Wer ist denn draußen und wer klopfet an [7'44]

10 Sir Charles Villiers Stanford (1852-1924):
La belle dame sans merci. O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms [6'06]

11 Anonymous – traditional, arr. Cyril Scott (1879-1970):
Lord Randall. O where hae ye been, Lord Randall, my son? [5'23]

12 Sir Arthur Sullivan (1842-1900):
The Lost Chord. Seated one day at the organ [4'17]

13 Louis Emanuel (1819-c1889):
The Desert. Alone in the desert, alone, I’m alone [6'55]

14 Cole Porter (1891-1964):
The Tale of the Oyster. Down by the sea lived a lonesome oyster [3'43]

Link to Hyperion with Samples of several songs

What the critics say

Andrew Stewart, Classic FM magazine, August 2011

The Music: The ballad, which left its mark on German music and English drawing rooms, is represented here by such cornerstone examles as Loewe’s Edward and Schubert’s Erlkönig. Sullivan’s Lost Chord, Emanuel’s Desert and Cole Porter’s Tales of the Oyster add sentiment, melodrama and sex appeal to this brilliantly blended programme.

The Performance: It takes a voice of Wagnerian proportions and bel canto finesse not to mention a pianist of copper-bottomed technique, to span the emotions contained within the short ride of Erlkönig. Gerald Finley and Julius Drake, his trusty partner in making music, avoid the bathos all too often applied to the song’s contrasts and concentrate instead on heightening its palpable sense of doom. Their approach to text and music consistently casts light on turbulent emotions, at times glaring in its dramatic intensity, at others passed through restraining filters. The recital’s heart pulses with Wolf’s Der Feuerreiter and a spine-tingling account of Stanford’s La belle dame sans merci.

The Verdict: Ballad singers, at least of the type presented here, have the toughest of acts to follow in the recorded form of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. Gerald Finley may be less explosive in his treatment of words but he makes every single one count, unfolding rich stories in song.

Jeremy Nicholas, Gramophone, August 2011

Romantic ballads, ranging from camp and colourful to utterly spellbinding.

This collection of strophic ballads has its fair share of the Gothic and Grand Guignol, most of it concerned with death, near-death or yearning for death. It opens with a rare glimpse of Beethovenian humour (“The Song of the Flea”) in a performance from Gerald Finley and Julius Drake that sets the tone and standard for the whole disc.

Finley, who has one of those exquisite voices that could make poetry of the telephone directory, vividly characterises the words without recourse to the exaggerated enunciation to which some of his peers are off-puttingly prone (only once did I wince at an over-egged delivery – “ex-ost-ed”, rather than ex-awst-ed”, in Louis Emanuel’s amusingly camp “The Desert”). Drake uses all the colouristic forces he can command with wit (“The Flea”), bravura (“Erlkönig and Wolf’s spellbinding “Der Feuerreiter) and imagination (Loewe’s “Die wandelnde Glocke”). As these pages have said before, it’s a great partnership.

I do question the musical and literary value of some of the songs presented here. Perhaps audiences were once moved by “Edward” (Loewe/Herder) or entranced by the risible “Die Löwenbraut” (“The Lion’s Bride”) by one Adelbert von Chamisso, a grim tale straight out of Strummelpeter set to music for some reason by Robert Schumann. Neither strikes me as distinguished in either area, though Finley and Drake make them engaging enough. The only two performances that don’t come off are “The Lost Chord” (too slow for its triumphal peroration to truly register) and Cole Porter’s “The Tale of the Oyster”, which is made to sound like something by Brahms.

John T Hughes, International Record Review, August 2011

When I saw the title of this CD, ‘The Ballad Singer’, I thought it would be a disc devoted wholly to British ballads, especially as the painting reproduced on the front of the booklet is Frank Dicksee’s La belle dame sans merci. (Yes, I know the title is French.) As one sees above, most of the songs (nine of the 14) are Lieder. Those German contributions so, however, tell stories rather than hymn the praises of the moon or the sea or whatever. As two songs by Loewe are followed by Schubert’s Erlkönig, it seems a pity that the setting of that song by the first of those composers is not included, though Gerald Finley did record it on a CD of Schubert contemporaries.

Finley is a good communicator and teller of stories, and I shall begin with a song which I first heard him sing in recital in the Crush Bar at Covent garden back in 1993, since when I have wanted and wanted for him to record it. The Desert by Louis Emanuel (1819-1889) is the piece in question. It is real silent picture stuff, of desert, man, sun, vulture, hell, Arabs, safety. Finley puts it across so well. Although many of these ballads are strophic, The Desert is not, being more episodic, each stanza creating a different aspect of the melodrama. Julius Drake may have had his tongue in his cheek as he played the accompaniment.

The CD actually begins with Beethoven’s song about that pampered flea, the lively piano part counteracting the more unadorned vocal line until both come together for the final rapid bars. Far more serious is the fate of Edward, who tells his mother that he has killed his falcon, his horse, and then… his father. Finley builds to a strong vocal outburst there, but what a stunning range of colours, of emphases, of emotions he brings as he reaches the climactic last line. In Erlkönig, another tale of death, one always wonders what choice the singer will make of differentiating the characters. Finley is basically straightforward but on some of the Erl King’s notes he imaginatively presses to reduce resonance and thus blunt the tone. Drake brings the necessary agility to the keyboard part, as he has in the songs mentioned above and to the contrasting figurations (I wanted to create the word ‘fingerations’) of Loewe’s ‘Die wandelnde Glocke’.

‘Die Löwenbraut’ finds the baritone quiet and resigned as the young woman tells her beloved lion that she has to go away, then, as the intended husband comes into view, Finley increases volume and intensity to describe the animal’s anger and its savaging of the girl. Well contrasted by both artists is Wolf’s ‘Der Feuerreiter’, its first three stanzas manic, the last two calmer but stark. Although that song ends with the discovery of the rider’s skeleton years later, sadder is ‘Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen’, with the girl visited by her dead soldier lover. Finley sings it caressingly. The Dicksee painting will have been chosen because of Stamford’s setting of Keat’s poem of the knight who fell under the power of ‘a lady in the meads … a faery’s child’. This is not a setting of violent contrasts or naked horror but it allows Finley to present the lush sonority of his voice as he relates the story in measured tones. In Cyril Scott’s arrangement of the Scottish ballad Lord Randall, another dialogue between mother and son, the upper reaches of Finley’s voice are put to good use.

The CD began with the flea, but it is an oyster which is the subject of the final song. Lord Randall might have been incurably poisoned by wine or eels, but in Cole Porter’s The Tale of the Oyster the rich Mrs Hoggenheimer becomes no more than subject to stomach pains. Porter’s words are amusing; Finley brings out the humour. It makes a light-hearted conclusion, an encore, virtually, to what has been an enjoyable recital of horror stories interlaced with some less serious songs.

Drake’s playing has successfully suited the varied repertoire. Finley has enthralled with his interpretations and delighted with his singing purely as singing, combining the two aspects expertly. If I were a reviewer who seems to think that it is mandatory to nominate a CD as outstanding each month I might consider proposing this well-recorded issue.

Richard Morrison, The Times, 18 June 2011

Four out of Five Stars

Listen to these wonderfully melodramatic, mostly Victorian ballads by candlelight in a haunted house. They range from well-known tales of the macabre (Schubert’s Erlkönig, Hugo Wolf’s Der Feuerreiter) to grisly rarities (Schumann’s Die Löwenbraut, in which a lovesick lion chews a girl to death rather than let her get married) to full-on Victorian maudlin (Sullivan’s The Lost Chord). Cole Porter’s The Tale of the Oyster and Cyril Scott’s arrangement of Lord Randall represent the 20^th century. Performances full of raging fortissimos and ghoulish tremolandos from Finley and his pianist Julius Drake.

Alex Baran, The Whole Note, August 2011

Singers crave novel material for their recordings: obscure works, cherished favourites… whatever it takes to create tempting new song packages. Baritone Gerald Finley’s recent release samples the Ballad repertoire and offers a wonderfully chosen program ranging from dark gothic musings of 19th century German and English composers to the devilishly clever writing of Cole Porter.

Finley lives up to his reputation for consistent and solid performance meeting the need of each ballad’s text with an impressive dramatic acuity that elevates the finest singers above the rest of their colleagues. Most notable is his amazing portrayal of the demon in Schubert’s Erlkönig where he assumes a strangely nasal vocal character and deliberately sings the Erlkönig’s extended passages just slightly flat to drive home the evil in the text. I’ve never heard this done before and it’s stunningly effective.

Similarly, Hugo Wolf’s Der Feuerreiter also offers some character vocal moments that most singers simply never attempt. Perhaps the biggest surprise is Finley’s multiple impersonations of narrator, mollusc and socialite in Cole Porter’s The Tale of The Oyster. Eating at a seafood restaurant will never be the same.

Long-time accompanist and artistic partner Julius Drake does so much more than just play the notes to back-up the voice. In Mahler’s Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen he crafts a remarkable orchestral colour palette from the keyboard. Drake knows how to be pianistically comedic as well as dramatic, romantic as well as impish. His artistic contribution is a significant reason for this disc’s success.

Hilary Finch, BBC Music Magazine, August 2011

Performance: Four out of Five Stars
Recording: Four out of Five Stars

A new idea for the anthology disc: here is Gerald Finley, in his vocal prime, as balladeer – telling tales of misadventure and gothic horror, from Romantic takes on medieval Scottish crimes of passion, to spooky Victorian parlour melodramas. Quite what constitutes a ballad is open to question and debated in Richard Wigmore’s accompanying essay.

I hadn’t thought of Beethoven’s flea-song from Goethe’s Faust as one, nor Sullivan’s ‘The Lost Chord’, though this is sung with admirable seriousness, and it leads to a more modern use of the term in Finley’s deliciously timed performance of ‘The Tale of the Oyster’ by Porter.

But, yes, they’re all tales and Finley is a fine tale-teller. In Loewe, he sounds as though he’s singing just for you, the listener, so rapt and intense is his communication. Drake is a fine accomplice, tuning his fingers to full orchestral capacity for Schumann’s psycho-drama ‘Die Löwenbraut’ and Wolf’s ‘Der Feuerreiter’, and relishing the cries of vultures and the tinkle of camel-train bells in Louis Emmanuel’s hilarious rescue-drama, ‘The Desert’.