dream.risk.sing: Elevating women's voices

dream.risk.sing

Big Sister Says, 1967 (a honky-tonk) (from Love after 1950)

[2:46]

Ballad (from Gold into Diamonds)

[3:29]

3 Ricky Ian Gordon (b. 1956)

My Mother is a Singer (from Sycamore Trees)

[3:11]

Judith Weir (b. 1954)

from woman.life.song* Breasts!! Song of the Innocent Wild-Child Edge

[5:36] [4:51]

Crossing Faultlines* 1. In the Margins 2. Like a Drum 3. And Now Her Song

[4:35] [1:52] [5:35]

from The Birth Project* II. Pregnant VII. First Miracle (piano solo) – VIII. Superhero

[2:49] [0:51] [1:38]

Infant Joy

[1:31]

from Bright Travellers 4. Milk Fever 5. Council Offices

[2:20] [3:24]

1 Libby Larsen (b. 1950)

elevating women’s voices

2

Samantha Crawford soprano (tracks 1–9, 11–17) Lana Bode piano

Carson Cooman (b. 1982)

4 5

Charlotte Bray (b. 1982) 6 7 8

Libby Larsen 9 10 11 12

Rebecca Clarke (1886–1979)

Helen Grime (b. 1981) Samantha Crawford and Lana Bode would like to thank the following individuals and organisations for advice and support: Lucy Schaufer, Lucy Walker, Yvonne Kenny, Roger Vignoles, Sholto Kynoch, Helen Clark, Elizabeth Weaver, Lydia Bode, Matthew Murphy, Andrew Woolhouse, Ralph Vaughan Williams Trust, Nicholas Boas Charitable Trust. Supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.

Recorded on 13-15 July 2022 at Greyfriars Kirk, Edinburgh Producer/Engineer: Paul Baxter 24-bit digital editing: Jack Davis 24-bit digital mastering: Paul Baxter Cover image and studio photography © Marshall Light Studio

Design: Drew Padrutt Session photography: foxbrushfilms.com Booklet editor: John Fallas Delphian Records Ltd – Edinburgh – UK www.delphianrecords.com

13 14 15

Florence Price (1887–1953)

The Heart of a Woman*

[1:44]

16

Antonín Dvořák (1841–1904)

Když mne stará matka (No 4 from Cigánské Melodie, Op. 55) My Daughters*

[2:22]

17

@ delphianrecords @ delphianrecords @ delphian_records

Michele Brourman (b. 1947)

Total playing time * premiere recording

[2:57] [51:42]

Notes on the music Judith Weir tells a story of receiving the text for her song-cycle woman.life.song, a collaboration with the soprano Jessye Norman and with three leading female poets: I waited for the words to come in … and I remember particularly the lengthy poems by Clarissa [Pinkola] Estés – these enormous rolls of paper coming through the fax machine …

Pinkola Estés had been asked by Norman to contribute two poems to the cycle (the results were ‘Breasts!! Song of the Innocent Wild-Child’, heard in a new arrangement on the present album, and ‘The Mothership: When a Good Mother Sails from This World’, set in two layers as the extended third part of the original cycle). Evidently she relished the opportunity, and the words just kept coming. While ‘The Mothership’ is imbued with grief and a kind of mythical female power, ‘Breasts!!’ is humorous and playfully naïve – and, although it contains lines such as ‘Oh, Breasts!! you are what I dream about’, absolutely not titillating. Rather, it expresses a desire to participate in a distinctively female rite of passage.

Originally scored for voice and a large chamber ensemble, woman.life.song was written in the year 2000, when an all-female creative team was still unusual. And this was a spectacular roster: Jessye Norman was the driving force as well as the original vocal soloist, while the other poets involved were

Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison. Ahead of the Carnegie Hall premiere, the team, apart from Angelou, appeared on a US talk show to discuss the piece, visibly overwhelming the male host (Charlie Rose, who was years later disgraced as part of the #MeToo movement).

Passing on the project to a new generation of women artists, Weir has made the two voiceand-piano arrangements heard on this album specifically in response to a request from Samantha Crawford and Lana Bode.

Around these two songs, Crawford and Bode have built a programme which develops the themes of female comradeship, of storytelling, and the question of what kind of legacy women artists leave behind. It includes songs about adolescence, bodies, love, work and legacy, while a palpable thread running throughout reminds us of the constraints on freedom that still shape women’s lives. This is a long way from the subject matter of most song recitals, and thus it is natural that much of the music should be new or unfamiliar. In commissioning and discovering appropriate repertoire, too, they aimed to ‘elevate women’s voices’. The majority of the songs use women’s words and music, and the three contributions from male composers are all of them celebratory and touchingly empathetic. * * * The first three songs are light in character, but with an edge. They expose the tyrannies,

both major and minor, of being female – from beauty standards, to giving up the self in marriage, to giving up a career for motherhood. Puberty is given a wonderfully lyrical treatment in the two Weir settings, while Charlotte Bray’s Crossing Faultlines is a rare thing indeed: a song-cycle about women in the workplace. There is a witty contemporary ‘annunciation’ in Libby Larsen’s ‘Pregnant’, along with a joyful embrace of forthcoming childbirth, while Rebecca Clarke’s ‘Infant Joy’ is a rapturous hymn to a newborn. Two songs from Helen Grime’s cycle Bright Travellers explore the physical pain of early motherhood and the shattering loss of miscarriage and stillbirth. Florence Price’s ‘The Heart of a Woman’ is a quietly devastating study of entrapment, a sobering pause for reflection. A deeply moving closing sequence concerns the legacy women leave to the next generation. dream.risk.sing lands at a febrile time in history. When first conceived, the project had two aims: to explore artistically the experiences of women, and to encourage further projects which could share and extend that first aim. But the increasingly alarming and fast-moving political and social climate in which it has come to fruition gives it greater urgency. One legacy women would presumably rather not leave to their daughters is the continuing fight for control over rights and bodies. Hillary Rollins, the

lyricist of My Daughters, has remarked that she is tired and angry that her daughter’s generation is having battles the secondwave feminists thought had been won. The landmark 1973 US abortion ruling Roe v.

Wade was overturned by the Supreme Court in June 2022. #MeToo continues to expose more predators. Every year on International Women’s Day the @PayGapApp Twitter account tags organisations who have yet to provide remunerative parity across the sexes.

The recent television series The Handmaid’s Tale, based on Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel, seems more horribly relevant every year; the red outfits worn by the handmaids have become a symbol of women’s rights. tyrannies.

Libby Larsen believes her task as a composer is ‘to order and make sense of sound, in time and space, to communicate through music something about being alive’. Her song cycle Love after 1950 was written for the singer Susanne Mentzer, with the aim of exploring ‘little real-life experiences’. Big Sister Says details the ferocious beauty regimes women are often conditioned to believe are necessary (plucking, tweezing, pressing lashes ‘with a medieval-looking clamp’).

Kathryn Daniels’ text is humorous and the vocal part expressively agile, while the noisy ‘honky-tonk’ accompaniment is witty, yet also channels the manic, almost aggressive energy of Jerry Lee Lewis.

Notes on the music Carson Cooman’s Ballad is a song of generational memory and tribute. Cooman was commissioned by Amanda Forsythe to set some of her mother Rebecca’s poems as an eightieth-birthday present. The third song from the resulting cycle depicts a dance, and the whirling energy of a young woman who later became a grandmother, but whose joy and freedom were curtailed by her life ‘under the rule’ and by the pain of being left to miscarry alone. Cooman’s ‘dancing’ music is abruptly replaced by monotone crotchets and quavers, yet returns as a poignant echo at the song’s close.

Similarly, the fictional mother addressed in the next item has given up singing ‘for the ring’. My Mother is a Singer is the centrepiece of Ricky Ian Gordon’s Sycamore Trees, described in reviews as a ‘memory musical’. The overall mood of the setting may indeed be sweetly nostalgic; but the vocal line has a tentative quality to it. Often revolving around just two notes, it seems perpetually in search of something it cannot find, and resolves only uncertainly at the end. rites.

Weir’s Breasts!! is considerably more optimistic: a young girl on the brink of puberty, not – as can be the case – terrified at the prospect, but eagerly waiting for the day when her breasts will arrive, and resolute about how she will present them to herself

and to the world (‘I would never flaunt them […] and especially, never fluff them’). The ‘innocent wild-child’ is anticipating a rite of passage, passing into a new realm of femaleness. Indeed, there is something Rite of Spring-like about the jagged rhythms in the accompaniment towards the end – but without the tragic conclusion of Stravinsky’s ballet. Toni Morrison’s poem Edge pictures a slightly later stage in adolescence, a time of early love and sexual experimentation – a raunchier text, given a sinuous, slinky setting. The whole cycle is surprisingly earthy for Weir, who more usually is drawn to the elusive, the understated and the indirect. Yet through her output runs a constant impulse to tell stories; woman.life. song is full of them. work.

At the time of writing, according to the TUC, the gender pay gap in the UK is as high as 31.4% in some industries (notably finance). By comparison to men, in other words, women work 114 days per year for free. Many of the issues they face in the workplace, moreover, are not widely discussed – as Charlotte Bray found when Samantha Crawford and Lana Bode asked her to write a song-cycle addressing these experiences and she found a complete absence of existing texts to set. Bray in turn therefore commissioned words from the writer Nicki Jackowska. The results, in

Crossing Faultlines, are a beguiling mix of mythical imagery and feet-on-the-ground realities: particularly in the final song, where the working woman’s uniform (surgical scrubs, or a suit and heels) is worn like armour in the battleground of the workplace.

‘In the Margins’ portrays a mentor–mentee relationship, the older composer (it is assumed) teasing an artistic voice from the ‘undergrowth’ of the younger woman’s consciousness. The clue is in the aspirational, soaring birds at the centre of the song. After this, in Bray’s setting of the text’s closing lines, the singer–composer’s voice must ‘go down, go down’ (literally, to a bottom G) to find the roots of her creativity, before rising back up through two octaves to take flight (a musical metaphor also found in the final song). More alarming echoes of The Rite of Spring – its plot, if not its music – can be heard in ‘Like a Drum’, with circling males zeroing in on the ‘fresh meat’ in the office in a horrifyingly detached depiction of how assault can be normalised at work. The vocal line veers from breathless monotone to highpitched terror. ‘And Now Her Song’ envisions a world of opportunity and ambition, as if the protagonist of the first song has taken her mentor’s advice and stridden forth. Yet the cycle does not follow a straightforward trajectory into triumph. The clashing major sevenths and other dissonances that punctuate all three songs suggest that

the issues raised are far from having been resolved. pregnant.

As with many songs in this programme, Larsen’s The Birth Project emerged from conversations about the dearth of songs reflecting certain life events, in this case childbirth ‘from the birthing mother’s perspective’. Pregnant depicts an Instagramready fantasy of ‘annunciation’, a woman eagerly awaiting her husband’s appearance so she can prepare a beautiful moment to tell him she is pregnant. Instead, she shrieks it at him the instant he arrives at the airport. The music is wistful, gently syncopated, and in suspended animation: the ‘holding’ stage of birth before the big event. First Miracle is an anticipatory piano solo, with a kinetic nervous energy, leading to Superhero, whose agile, effortless vocal lines marvel at the capability of women’s bodies and what they are ‘intended to do’. mothers.

One of the earliest-composed items in the programme is Rebecca Clarke’s Infant Joy, an almost reverential song of joy towards a newborn, although it begins, in William Blake’s idiosyncratic text, with words ‘spoken’ by the two-day old child. It is a gentle, hymn-like setting, far from the edgy chromaticism of many of Clarke’s other vocal works – an idealised portrayal of early motherhood, perhaps, glowing with serenity.

Notes on the music Helen Grime’s Milk Fever is a considerably more visceral depiction of this life experience.

Breasts, this time responding physically to the needs of the newborn baby, tighten with the child’s cry, and ‘leap’ in response to its need for food. The drumbeat of the piano evokes this physical ‘pulsing’, but also the heaviness of fatigue in those early days of motherhood. The song speaks of exhaustion, and the spiky piano figures suggest frayed nerves. Yet the leap at the end could be one of agony or of ecstasy – or a complex mixture of both. A lonely piano line opens Council Offices, though it will transform into a lullaby by the song’s end. In between is a bleak yet empathetic account of miscarriage and stillbirth, which manages to be both clinically truthful and touchingly compassionate. heart.

More compassion is evident in Florence Price’s song, The Heart of a Woman, in which the ‘woman’ is not named but could be any woman at any time. The song sets a poem by the Harlem Renaissance poet Georgia Douglas Johnson, in which a woman’s ‘heart’ attempts to break from its ‘sheltering bars’. While the vocal line has parity with the piano register in the first part of the song, in the second it is contained within spiky octave ‘bars’, which appear – whether deliberately or not – to confine the singer within the stave.

legacy.

Legacy is a concept that is often gendered masculine (as dramatised over several seasons in the recent television drama Succession). In this strand of the programme, the passing of songs and stories from mother to daughter – whether biological or not – is the theme. Dvořák’s famous Songs my Mother Taught Me (from his 1880 collection Gypsy Songs) has a heart-on-sleeve Romanticism, a powerfully evocative title, and is so contagiously lyrical it is easy to imagine it surviving through subsequent generations.

Michele Brourman’s My Daughters could have claimed the same title as it is, on the surface, a passing on of words, wisdom and ‘light’ to ‘daughters’. Yet the intention for the song was far from this literal interpretation.

For Brourman, who has sons and no daughters, the ‘passing on’ is intended for everyone: a ‘legacy of spirit more than any literal childbirthing’. ‘Bella’ and ‘Justice’, named at the beginning, are nods to feminist campaigner Bella Abzug and the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, as well as to an ideal of beauty and truth. Furthermore, the words were inspired by a poem by Jo-Ann Mort about the pain of not having children.

Lyricist Hillary Rollins took it into a somewhat different direction, but had been caught by the general sense of trusting the next generation of women to continue to ‘fight the

fires of hell … and then ignite the righteous light of truth’s eternal flame’. The musical setting was conceived with particular care by Brourman, and is in a frictionless major key, sincere in its optimism. As such, it is a song of hope. In order to take the risk, women need to dream – and sing – of a better world. © 2023 Lucy Walker Lucy Walker is a freelance musicologist, writer and podcaster specialising in twentiethand twenty-first-century music. She has edited two books on Benjamin Britten and is co-editor of the forthcoming Maconchy in Context for Cambridge University Press.

Texts and translations 1 Big Sister Says, 1967

Beauty hurts, big sister says, yanking a hank of my lanky hair around black wire-mesh rollers whose inside bristles prick my scalp like so many pins. She says I’d better sleep with them in.

She plucks, tweezes, glides razor blades over tender armpit skin, slathers downy legs with stinking depilatory cream, presses straight lashes bolt upright with a medieval-looking padded metal clamp. Looking good hurts, Beryl warns. It’s hard work when you’re not born beautiful.

Copyright © 1999 Kathryn Daniels. Reprinted by permission

My grandfather was the teacher, and his stare Led him through courtship to the dancer’s hand.

My grandmother danced in Kentucky, Before her dancing was banned.

A wand of a woman, thin as a willow wand, She married her teacher. He went back to school.

He learned to be a preacher.

She learned to live by rule.

Alone in the house, the morning fine and cool, The baby came before time, no one near to hear a moan.

My grandfather deep in religion.

My grandmother bleeding alone.

There’s beauty of color, and beauty in the bone, She had them both, whether lit by the sun or the moon.

My grandmother danced in Kentucky, But the dancing stopped too soon.

Copyright © 2001 Rebecca Forsythe. Reprinted by permission

2 Ballad

Sixteen years old, she went to a dance at school And dazzled the boys, and dazzled the teacher more; My grandmother danced in Kentucky, Skirts sweeping the bare wood floor.

The prettiest girl in three counties, maybe four, Her hair black shining silk, the darkest there, My grandmother danced in Kentucky, My grandfather watched her hair.

Sing of all your courage what Mama who said life is fair you know it’s not Mama please you know you’ve given us a lot Mama sing Sing of all your sorrow dream Mama borrow what was pretty when you slept Mama make believe a promise can be kept Mama sing I love you more and more now yes Mama even though this life is such a mess Mama just to hear your voice is a caress Mama sing Sing of how it’s not what you expected Sing and disappointment is directed No we aren’t born to be rejected sing Sometimes when you’re singing it’s funny something in your face becomes so real Mama what’re all those things you seem to feel Mama sing

3 My Mother is a Singer

My mother is a singer sing Mama sing of how you gave up everything Mama burned your whole career for a fling Mama sing

My mother is a singer sing Mama sing of what you gave up for the ring Mama sing of what you take and what you bring Mama sing Ricky Ian Gordon (b. 1956) Reprinted by permission

4 Breasts!! Song of the Innocent Wild-Child

I have been waiting, and I have been waiting, and all over the world are millions just like me …

We are all waiting – just waiting and waiting, for the most important thing …

Breasts!!

Oh when shall I receive my breasts?

Will they be like the tiny hearts of birds beating?

Or sonorous, even ponderous, like majestic bells swaying and ringing across the land?

Oh, Breasts!!

They will be so beautiful …

Do you suppose, even though mine do not yet show, that they are all ready, and just waiting, deep inside of me?

And if I squeeze my waist, like this, or if I tense my wrists together, will they – just – – pop – – out??!! – visible at last?

Oh, Breasts!! you are what I dream about – yet, wait …

Does a beloved ocean have breasts …?

Texts and translations Does an ocean even need them?

No, an ocean has its crests, and every current needed for dreaming.

Does a butterfly have breasts?

No, but still everyone thrills to the sunlight through her wings.

Oh, Breasts!!

If I had breasts I would wear them ever so smartly, I would use them to proudly point with, or flash them in disdain, or lift them up in joy – but I would never flaunt them, nor stuff them, and especially, never fluff them … except on special ceremonial occasions … when I would wear ruffles ‘down to here’, every chance I got!

Oh, Breasts!!

The testers of my patience.

Everyone has them but me …

Chinese, Zulus and Haitians, Hawaiians, Aleuts and Transylvanians, Balinese, Russians and Romanians …

Everyone but me …

Oh, Breasts!!

In fairytales, they say giantesses have breasts so long they can throw them over their shoulders.

Will mine be like that?

Will they be like two young candles glowing in every dark and gloaming?

or like sweet and tasty cherries swelling from the branches, or maybe they’ll be cone-shaped like shy little tulips, or maybe they’ll be mellow like ripe and dusky melons, or maybe they’ll be ‘this big’ and take up all the room – in any room I’m in.

Will having breasts change my voice?

Will breasts make me taller?

When will I receive them? for with breasts, I am certain that – I will rule the world! – Come! O Lady of my body, for I am blessed amongst women – untie the ribbons of my body, so it can swell in the way it is meant to …

Oh, Mounder of Breasts, Untier of Ribbons, Singer to Flowers Unfolding, please, please, come to me soon?

Breasts!

Tempestuous Breasts!!

Holy Mothers of every living creature, holy with desire, holy and on fire!

Breasts-to-be!

Be alive!

Now!!

Clarissa Pinkola Estés (b. 1945)

5 Edge

He was a boy – just a boy – and I was a very young girl.

In blazing light and shadows trimmed in gold we took the risk of love the grist of love the dreamy, steamy mist of love.

For he was a boy – just a boy – and I was a very young girl racing to the edge of love the bed of love the love-me-til-I’m-dead of love.

He was a boy – just a boy – and I was a very young girl.

We were new to time and dreams were real.

We could play out the line to the edge of life the bed of life the love-me-til-I’m-dead of life.

For he was a boy – just a boy – and I was a very young girl.

Toni Morrison (1931–2019) ‘Breasts!!’ and ‘Edge’ from woman.life.song © 2000 Chester Music Limited. Reprinted by permission

Crossing Faultlines

6 In the Margins

It is a long, long way to the top of the mountain where an oak is raised, etching the sky You might think this proud and canny woman top of her game, would show me all her wisdom, threads of her knowing, in extravagant display But no, it is not like that there is no river between us no innocent way Between us a ball of scarlet wool between us a mist shrouding the wall The station hosts a piano for anyone to play This day, the notes fly like birds, lining my way It is not the bouquet I bring nor the coffee I pour her not the notes on my page that catch in the roots of her No, it is not that, not that A crow is perched on her shoulder Beneath our feet, the forest’s mould Try as I might, I cannot please her The clown laughs his tears into my lap She turns my hand-bitten pages rings a phrase with her inky pen that must be blue, is always blue Here, she says, is the undergrowth breaking through

Texts and translations See here, it is this faultline dividing us in two It is here you find your story, go down, go down There’s a crowd in the margins, waiting for you 7 Like a Drum

Like a drum-beat underground calling the tribe the new girl spins bares and strips in the office heat She’ll do, she’ll do but who will stop her flight dare the first bite Dress full of roses on to the catwalk clicking her heels through croaks grunts, creaks the whispered jokes

no-one knows what is the matter when her typing slows or how that bruise branding her neck glows rosy-red 8 And Now Her Song

It begins in the frozen north she can hear the ice breathing The city roars, burning the sky a long way south, she will enter the heart of it, she will fly to the top floor, to the towering heights, suited and heeled, wrapped in the gaze of a star-struck company Shatter of glass, the image breaks she can only gape and stutter searching for pearls in the city’s gutter

Who will be first to slake his thirst stockroom, tearoom or where they keep the broom

Mary among many scraping ammonite clinging to railings chanting her right called to a bedside hiss of his dying story through the long night

Fat and fatuous he sniffs his way through roses, roses they burn and scatter

trying on uniforms blue for surgery steel-grey for the office machinery

swathed in white for bees or chemistry Or is she called to the Bar breaking the sombre tones of a High Court judge, a glitzy glittering gaudy spider brooch pinned to her black lapel, thief of her verdict and the infamy Or will she crawl among the forest’s mystery capturing shards of the earth’s long memory finding a single mushroom alive in the ash She will risk, dream, sing where angels fear to with her pen her voice her excavation

9 Pregnant

My husband was out of town, but he’d be home that evening. I’d be picking him up at the airport, but I wouldn’t tell him … there. The news was too momentous, too beautiful to be delivered at an airport or an automobile. I would lead him into our little red cottage by the pond where I’d open a bottle of nonalcoholic sparkling something and say the word I’d been wanting to say to him for a year. … pregnant, pregnant, pregnant … When I drove to the airport he was there already … ‘I’m PREGNANT!’, I shrieked crazily the minute his eyes met mine. People looked at us in alarm.

I’ve always been terrible at keeping secrets.

Cheryl Strayed (b. 1968) 11 Superhero

It’s your turn now your turn to risk it everywhere

When the day finally arrived, two weeks after my due date, my husband and I walked to the farmers’ market and bought peaches and tomatoes, stopping to lean on benches along the way. Contractions came and went … I began to think this whole birthing thing would be no sweat … I would handle this. My body was made for birthing. My baby knew how to come out … My first son was born on a Saturday night, and Monday morning I was feeling ecstatic and capable of anything … I was a superhero.

your turn to dare

Phoebe Damrosch (b. 1978)

What then these spinners and weavers, chameleons, are they deceivers?

Wool unwinds she greets the minotaur

Nicki Jackowska (b. 1942) Crossing Faultlines © 2021 Nicki Jackowska.

Reprinted by permission

Texts and translations 12 Infant Joy

‘I have no name: I am but two days old.’

What shall I call thee?

‘I happy am, Joy is my name.’

Sweet joy befall thee!

Pretty Joy! Sweet Joy, but two days old.

Sweet Joy I call thee: Thou dost smile, I sing the while, Sweet joy befall thee!

William Blake (1757–1827)

13 Milk Fever

When she screams I can’t help it, I sweat and the skin of my nipples becomes like water’s skin, that thin meniscus I’ve seen dimple and crease round a pond-skater’s feet – think of the way water begins to tremble in its glass as the earthquake begins – so my breasts pulse and the fine membrane of each nipple tightens,

lets through a drop of milk – she calls to my body and my body leaps.

14 Council Offices

The registrar asks If this is our first live-born child; and I think of the shuttered room and rolling screen – my empty womb and that failed scrap of foetal sac – then remember again the corridor of the labour ward and that woman sitting weeping with her man having given birth to a death – small grey face, no breath, something you cannot help but love – habibi, akushla, I go home alone but carry you,

courie you, little slipped thing, to the ends of the earth.

Fiona Benson (b. 1978) ‘Milk Fever’ and ‘Council Offices’ from Bright Travellers © 2017 Chester Music Limited. Reprinted by permission 15 The Heart of a Woman

The heart of a woman goes forth with the dawn, As a lone bird, soft winging, so restlessly on, Afar o’er life’s turrets and vales does it roam In the wake of those echoes the heart calls home.

The heart of a woman falls back with the night, And enters some alien cage in its plight, And tries to forget it has dreamed of the stars While it breaks, breaks, breaks on the sheltering bars.

Georgia Douglas Johnson (1880–1966) 16 Když mne stará matka

Když mne stará matka zpívat, zpívat učívala, podivno, že často, často slzívala.

A teď také pláčem snědé líce mučím, když cigánské děti hrát a zpívat, hrát a zpívat učím!

Adolf Heyduk (1835–1923)

When my old mother taught me to sing, to sing, it’s strange that often, often she cried.

Now my aged cheeks too are wet with tears, when I teach gypsy children to sing and play, to sing and play!

17 My Daughters

My daughters will be Bella and Justice with curly hair cascading down in shades of ash and blondish brown, like mine was once, before I dyed it red to try and look like someone else instead.

My daughters will be singers and sailors and when I’m old they’ll sing to me like Sirens on a raging sea.

Their songs will rise above all light and sound and lift my sinking ship to higher ground.

Like me, they’ll dress in black on black No nonsense and no turning back And yes, they’ll sing, but also shout.

They won’t give up, they won’t give out.

They’ll fight the fires of hell that I could never tame and then ignite the righteous light of truth’s eternal flame.

My daughters will be rebels and readers and when my eyes no longer see, they’ll read me my old poetry and when it’s time to find that sweet release I’ll pass my pen to them so that the poetry won’t cease, and knowing this will let me go in peace.

Hillary Rollins (b. 1956)

Biographies Equally at home on the opera stage and the concert platform, British-Australian soprano Samantha Crawford has been praised for her ‘crystalline tone and diction’ (The Arts Desk) and for her ‘fine-cut soprano [voice] which brought singing of class’ (Opera Magazine).

Samantha made her operatic debut at the 2014 Aldeburgh and Edinburgh International festivals as Mrs Coyle in Britten’s Owen Wingrave, conducted by Mark Wigglesworth.

Subsequent roles have included Ortlinde in Robert Carsen’s production of Die Walküre at Teatro Real, Madrid; Santuzza in Cavalleria Rusticana at West Green Opera House; Donna Anna in Don Giovanni and Erste Dame in Die Zauberflöte at Garsington Opera; the title role in Suor Angelica at the Théâtre Municipal de Fontainebleau; Elisabeth in Tannhäuser at Saffron Hall; as well as roles at English National Opera, Glyndebourne, Scottish Opera, Hong Kong City Hall and Schlosstheater Schönbrunn, Austria. Her performances at Teatro Real, both in Die Walküre and in Claus Guth’s production of Parsifal, were filmed for television and DVD and broadcast to cinemas across Spain.

Her concert performances have included recital engagements at Wigmore Hall, the Royal Albert Hall, LSO St Luke’s, Cadogan Hall and the Barbican. Recent solo appearances include Verdi’s Requiem at Southwark Cathedral, Mendelssohn’s Elijah at Gloucester Cathedral, Strauss’s Vier letzte Lieder at Newbury Spring

Festival, Wagner’s Wesendonck Lieder at the City of London Festival, and Chausson’s Poème de l’amour et de la mer at Milton Court. She commissioned and premiered Charlotte Bray’s Crossing Faultlines with pianist Lana Bode as part of dream.risk. sing: elevating women’s voices at Oxford Lieder Festival in October 2021 and gave a subsequent performance in 2022 at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts.

Samantha studied with Yvonne Kenny AM as a Baroness de Turckheim Scholar at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama and graduated from the Opera Course with distinction. She is an alumna of the Wagner Bayreuth Stipendium, Britten Pears Young Artist Programme and Garsington Opera’s Alvarez Young Artists’ Programme. She was awarded the Golden Medal with Honours at the 2017 Berliner International Music Competition; the 2017/18 NSW Wagner Society Award for Emerging Wagner Singers; and, in 2016, won First Prize and the President’s Prize at the Wagner Society Singing Competition in London.

Lana Bode is an American-British pianist, programmer and artistic director, whose performances have been hailed as ‘expertly calibrated’ (BBC Music Magazine) and ‘deeply examined’ (Gramophone). She specialises in contemporary music and in innovative

cross-arts programming. She has shared the stage with singers and instrumentalists of the highest calibre, including Robert Cohen, Marcus Farnsworth, Alessandro Fisher, Marta Fontanals-Simmons, Emma Halnan, Anna Harvey, Robert Murray, Mark Padmore, Lucy Schaufer and James Turnbull. She is also a member of the Tailleferre Ensemble.

An acclaimed and in-demand recitalist, Lana regularly appears in concert halls and festivals across the UK, including the Aldeburgh Festival, Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Barbican Hall, Kings Place, Opera Holland Park, Purcell Room, Snape Proms and Wigmore Hall. International engagements have taken her to the USA, France and Germany, and she can frequently be heard in live broadcasts on BBC Radio 3.

As a champion of new music, Lana has given the world premieres of works by Terence Allbright (Two Pierrot Songs), Charlotte Bray (Crossing Faultlines, Oxford Lieder Festival), Scott Eyerly (My Life Online, Edinburgh Fringe Festival), Stuart MacRae (Lovely ter of lovely eye, with Lucy Schaufer), Kevin Malone (HerStories Unsung, Vol 2), Zoë Martlew (In the Park, with Alessandro Fisher), Jeremy Thurlow (A London Street in Winter) and Mark-Anthony Turnage (Of Nature’s Light, Opera Holland Park). Lana has also collaborated with the composers Alison Bauld, Harrison Birtwistle, Jonathan Dove, Helen Grime, Sadie Harrison, Libby Larsen and Judith Weir.

Previous recordings include her highly acclaimed debut album I and Silence: Women’s Voices in American Song with mezzo-soprano Marta Fontanals-Simmons (Delphian, 2019) and There are things to be said with the Tailleferre Ensemble (Ulysses Arts, 2023), coupling Germaine Tailleferre’s own Sonate champêtre with recent works by Cecilia McDowall, Rhian Samuel and Ingrid Stölzel, a 1917 wind trio by the GermanDutch composer Julius Röntgen, and a Baroque rarity by Melchior Hoffmann.

Lana trained in the USA and the UK, at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music and then at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, London. She was awarded scholarships and awards from both institutions, including the Founders Scholar Award (IU) and the Concert Recital Diploma (GSMD).

After graduating, she held positions as a Samling Artist, a Leverhulme Artist, and a Park Lane Group Young Artist; and she is an alumna of the Britten Pears Young Artist Programme. Lana was the inaugural winner of the Viola Tunnard Young Artist award, resulting in a year-long residency at Britten Pears Arts. She also holds a Postgraduate Certificate in Performance Teaching, and is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Lana is co-founder and Artistic Director of the concert project ‘Virginia Woolf & Music’, and a member of faculty at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama.

Biographies

Also available on Delphian Héloïse Werner: Phrases with Lawrence Power, Colin Alexander, Laura Snowden, Calum Huggan, Daniel Shao, Amy Harman

I and Silence: Women’s Voices in American Song Lieberson – Argento – Barber – Copland – Crumb Marta Fontanals-Simmons mezzo-soprano, Lana Bode piano

PRESTO Editor’s choice

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The expectations of silence often placed on women historically and politically, and music’s power to break through them, are the themes of this deeply personal recital. Channelling the voices of female writers and musicians, FontanalsSimmons and Bode include two works written for great mezzo-sopranos of the recent past, Dame Janet Baker and Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, while settings of Emily Dickinson and Sara Teasdale fill out a programme which meditates powerfully on loss, vulnerability, tenacity and mindfulness.

Luminous and daring, this celebration of Héloïse Werner’s multifaceted gifts is nourished by rich dualities. Phrases reveals Werner as both singer and composer, as an artist shaped by both her native France and her adopted UK, and as a soloist of captivating individuality who is also an intrepid collaborator.

The solos and duos that make up the album comprise five of Werner’s own compositions, four of Georges Aperghis’s avant-garde classic Récitations, and six newly commissioned works, by composers ranging from Elaine Mitchener and Cheryl Frances-Hoad to Nico Muhly and Oliver Leith. The calibre of Héloïse’s instrumental partners in the duos reflects the degree to which this extraordinary young performer is already valued and cherished by her peers.

‘Solid vocal production and excellent diction … [Fontanals-Simmons] prefers the words and music to do the talking, and they do so eloquently’ — BBC Music Magazine, October 2019

Unveiled (Britten –Tippett – Gipps – Browne –Thomas) Elgan Llŷr Thomas tenor, Iain Burnside piano, Craig Ogden guitar

PRESTO Editor’s choice

Editor’s choice

‘a soprano of extraordinary abilities, possessing a seemingly inexhaustible expressive range, [and] a composer and arranger of subtle imagination …

Delphian’s sound is first-rate, catching the full dynamic range and every nuance of Werner’s voice’ — Gramophone, June 2022, EDITOR’S CHOICE

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PRESTO Editor’s choice

In Jeremy Sams’ new English-language singing version of Britten’s Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo, the passionate sentiments are liberated from the safe historical distance of the Italian Renaissance and unveiled in a way that was not possible in 1940, when Britten wrote the cycle – his first for his partner Peter Pears. Tenor Elgan Llŷr Thomas presents it alongside Michael Tippett’s equally ardent Songs for Achilles and a short item by W. Denis Browne, a close friend of the poet Rupert Brooke, as well as premiere recordings of four Brooke settings by Ruth Gipps and a new song-cycle by Thomas himself, to poems by Andrew McMillan. Tackling themes of love, shame, acceptance, war and death, the programme traverses a history of male homosexuality from necessary discretion to the (relatively) liberated present.

‘Hearing Britten’s Michelangelo Sonnets in [Sams’] translations is quite a revelation … Thomas and Burnside do it full, impassioned justice, and the Welsh tenor’s own Swan (combining tenderness and flashes of quirky humour) acts as a most effective counterpart’ — Presto Music, June 2023, EDITOR’S CHOICE

Our Indifferent Century (Britten – Finzi – Marsey – Ward) Francesca Chiejina soprano, Fleur Barron mezzo-soprano, Natalie Burch piano DCD34311

In 1914 Thomas Hardy wrote of ‘our indifferent century’; a generation later W.H. Auden urgently sought to fuse the political with the creative.

Today, profoundly unsettled by the turn of the world’s politics, three artists respond with a programme that explores the changes and challenges we face presently, but one that also offers hope, levity and even a degree of irreverence, and that never loses sight of the joy and beauty of nature. Hardy and Auden found their perfect musical counterparts in the songwriting of Finzi and Britten; contemporary composers William Marsey and Joanna Ward add their own voices of political urgency and wistful yearning.

New in October 2023

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