Review:Leeds Lieder, Iestyn Davies, Joseph Middleton and Nardus Williams at Leeds Town Hall, Saturday 31st October 2020
FORTY eight hours after tenor Ian Bostridge and pianist Joseph Middleton’s performance of Schubert’s Winterreise - Winter Journey - had mesmerised a Leeds Town Hall audience, superstar countertenor Iestyn Davies joined Middleton on stage for Schubert’s song cycle Die schöne Müllerin - The Fair Maid of the Mill.
Wilhelm Müller’s text depicts a naive youth meandering beside a babbling brook. Upon reaching a watermill, the lad meets and falls in love with the miller’s daughter. She eventually spurns him in favour of a young huntsman. So, youthful innocence and passion abound in Schubert’s music but the pain of rejection inexorably follows.
Iestyn Davies is only the second countertenor in the last few decades known to have performed this, the earlier of Schubert’s two great song cycles. The forty one year-old has been hailed as ‘a sensation’ at New York’s Metropolitan Opera and on Broadway, where he starred alongside Mark Rylance in Claire van Kampen’s new play Farinelli and the King. Davies sang the role of Farinelli, a famous castrato opera singer whose visits to King Philip V of Spain reputedly saved the ailing Monarch from losing his marbles.
The therapeutic effect of a singer with Davies’s sheer beauty of line and youthful purity of tone is entirely plausible. But Davies the consummate performer does even more. He weighs the effect of Müller’s words and, supported by Middleton’s spectrum of pianistic colours, makes us feel that a narrative is unfolding. Singer and pianist suffused the final songs with a sense of melancholy. Der Müller under der Bach (the Miller and the Brook) and Des Baches wiegenlied (Of the Brook’s Lullaby) could hardly have sounded more serenely beautiful.
Earlier in the evening, emerging young artist Nardus Williams displayed an innate sense of the structure of songs by Liszt, Brahms and Wolf. In particular, the romantic sweep of Liszt’s Oh, Quand je Dors was a marvellous vehicle for her sensuous creamy soprano.
Every note of the three Leeds Lieder autumn concerts was live streamed from Leeds Town Hall. They are available to view on demand during lockdown. Passes can be purchased from www.leedstownhall.co.uk
by Geoffrey Mogridge
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