3 hours ago
7
Nothing dusty about the performances on the new recording from the mezzo-soprano Sarah Connolly and pianist Joseph Middleton, or their music choices, a varied and painterly selection of French and English-language songs. Chausson’s Poème de l’Amour et de la Mer has more often been recorded with orchestra; with piano it unavoidably loses some of its oceanic glitter and heft, but Middleton plays this sweeping, Wagner-inspired music in full colour, and Connolly is a powerful narrator, her rich tone subtly hollowed out for the fleeting moments of bleakness. In Debussy’s Chansons de Bilitis she’s not the usual ingenue, but she and Middleton make a worldlier-sounding interpretation work, paying attention to every word and every sensual harmonic shift.
The recording’s title comes from one of Copland’s Emily Dickinson settings, put across here with appealing immediacy. Barber’s Op 10 Three Songs bring longer, more expansive lines from Connolly, and a slight American accent – which broadens for the second song of Night Thoughts, a song cycle by Errollyn Wallen inspired by the artist Howard Hodgkin and written for Connolly and Middleton in 2023. It’s admittedly hard to imagine this particular song done in cathedral English given that its narrator, singing Wallen’s own words, is Ella Fitzgerald. Connolly, who sang jazz early in her career, is surely one of few singers who could be convincing in both this and the angular settings of Dickinson and Shakespeare with which Wallen frames it.
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