As Opera Holland Park enjoys a half-time break it is time once more for Opera in Song to take to the stage. As usual, the programmes compiled by Julien van Mellaerts and Dylan Perez bear some relationship to the operas in the main programme (in this case Will Todd’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland) while also referencing songs that are close to operatic arias in their dramatic form or mood. In this first concert the focus was on nonsense texts and how composers have set them, thus riffing off Lewis Carroll’s own particular kind of precise wildness in different ways. These songs were framed by Victorian art songs of a lush, well-upholstered kind by composers whose works Carroll might well have heard. In his introduction Dylan Perez described the programme as a journey from the ‘crazy to the sublime’, showing how the imagination can be stimulated in contrasting ways. The small but enthusiastic audience certainy relished the juxtaposition.
Madeline Boreham opened proceedings with three songs by Elgar that deserve to be better known, and perhaps orchestrated to bring that about. The magnificent sweep and swagger of ‘The Wind at Dawn’ came from the same sound world as ‘Sea Pictures’, a cycle which would suit the power and presence of Boreham’s voice admirably. In ‘Twilight’ she also demonstrated a rare ability in the final ‘adieu’ to sustain an even, thin filament of tone to fine effect. On a toasty evening, ‘In Moonlight’ had an apt Mediterranean feel to it, evoked by the echoes of Elgar’s ‘In the South’ in both melody and accompaniment.
Robert Murray followed up with six short Poulenc settings of nonsense verse, where the words were random, or at least surreal, while the mood, image or gesture were clear, enhanced by the composer’s ever-suprising, shape-shifting harmony in the deft accompaniments. Next we had a duet delivering an account of Edwward Lear’s ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’, whose sentimental ballad style neatly dovetailed with the tongue-in-cheek romance depicted. In the same vein were two songs by Liza Lehmann that almost seemed to anticipate Flanders and Swann in their arch, mock-heroic cleverness. You could somehow tell that Lehmann was a singer as well as a composer, as these songs, set to texts by Lewis Carroll himself, sat easy on the voice and were tailor-made for impressive delivery to an audience. We need to know more of her work.
Similarly impressive, and also unknown to me in this form, were three songs that Walton extracted from Facade and developed into full vocal settings, rather than mere narration. These are varied in mood and very tricky to perform. Perez found delicate touch to depict the dappled shade and rustle of leaves in ‘Daphne’, and Boreham leaned stylishly into the Spanish rhythms of ‘Through Gilded Trellises’, and the foxtrot of ‘Old Sir Faulk.’ Another highpoint of technique came in Murray’s narration of the ‘The Ballad of Mr and Mrs Discobbolus’, another somewhat disturbing Lear poem with a lot to say about both procrastination and random violence. Buxton Orr’s setting is long and complex, and Murray put it across very persuasively, while Perez depicted the final explosion vividly.
The concert ended back in the plush territory of Victorian high romance. Three songs by Parry, and especially ‘My heart is like a singing bird’, showed off Boreham’s effortless velvety tone to best advantage, and made me want to hear her singing Strauss before long, whether on stage or in concert hall. Her voice has a huge dynamic range and while she made very good use of both ends of the range, more focus on mezzo forte delivery would develop another facet of her instrument. Not to be outdone, Murray gave us an eloquent rendition of Stanford’s version of Tennyson’s ‘Crossing the Bar’, tapping that vein of timelessly eloquent elegy he had made his own in ‘Songs of the Sea.’
Murray also pointed out that Stanford was himself fond of setting Lear’s nonsense verse under his palindromic pseudonym of Karel Drofnatzki. It would have been good idea perhaps to include some of these in the programme as a way of tying the two strands of song-writing together. However, as things stood, the songs chosen had skilfully demonstrated both the high seriousness of Victorian song writing, and the other side that is the necessary light relief and mad-cap escape from it.
Performers: Madeline Boreham, Robert Murray, Dylan Perez
1 hrs 15 mins, no interval
22 June 2026
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