It’s rare for me to write or even think of writing a rave review, but I just must. For the last two nights (23rd and 24th, June 2013) I’ve sat down with my wife and listened to the Cardiff Singer of the World Competition. What we heard on both nights ‘blew us away’ … please excuse the incoherent cliché. When the results on both nights were announced I have no shame in admitting that I, at least, found my arms punching up towards the ceiling in the standard ‘goal’ gesture, together with a loud ‘Yes! Our winner had won and it was a no-contest. No other finishers were within sight, or in this case, within earshot.
It wasn’t however just that. We had heard a musician of a magnitude on the Richter Scale of 9 or 10. We had heard a singer of the same scope, with a multitude of colours in her voice, inflections in her tone … innumerable tones … and perfectly pitched approaches to her wonderfully chosen music. Revelation piled on revelation. Earthquake on earthquake.
In case you are wondering what on earth a grown man of mature years is doing writing such stuff, I call my wife to witness that she thought exactly the same. (She often requires quite some persuasion to agree with me, and more often than not I don’t have enough persuasion in stock.)
Jamie Barton is an American mezzo-soprano, cast on generous lines with a hugely generous sound, and with a face that is one of the most expressive I have ever seen put to the use of music. I don’t just mean the usual stock expressions: her riveting characterisation of the Evil Witch in an excerpt from Humperdinck’s ‘Hansel and Gretel’ actually frightened me, whereas her calm and even demeanour was perfect when a very different composer, Sibelius, required her to simply present the music in all its plain glory. Her final masterstroke of Dido’s farewell from Berlioz‘ The Trojans was indescribable both vocally and dramatically. This was genius, ending her programme very quietly on a note of deep tragedy, when all about her were merely shouting banal top notes to whip up cheap applause, or scuttling up and down scales and arpeggios with the same intention. She also gave not a sign of any pre-packed ready-to-go interpretation lifted from other singers, the kind of thing that sounds as if picked up on a cardboard platter from the local take-away. She does her own hard yards that allow her to be completely certain of herself in the extraordinary range of her responses to such a variety of composers. She forges her own knowledge and therefore her own certainty.
What has this got to do with brass players, I hear you ask? Nothing at all if you are happy with the Charles Atlas kick-sand-in-their faces kind of instrumental demonstration all too prevalent in modern brass performance. If however the expressive possibilities that are revealed by different musicians from different genres shines a searchlight on other fascinating ways of doing things can that be other than good?
howardsnell 