Horace Keats was born in London in 1895 and began his
musical life as a ship’s pianist criss-crossing the oceans finding himself
in Australia in 1915. He secured extensive employment accompanying silent
films and directing small bands and joined the then burgeoning radio
stations, notably ABC. It wasn’t until he was in Perth however in the
early 1930s that he set to composition, challenged by his wife to set
some Chinese lyrics to music. Keats set a notable amount of poetry by
his contemporaries over the course of the next decade or so – especially
Hugh McCrae and he extensively mined the poetry of Christopher Brennan
with a single-mindedness that recalls Finzi’s settings of Hardy.
Keats could "do" hearty and he could equally
apply himself to the lambency of some of these settings; deeper and
richer veins of meaning were certainly not beyond him either and the
best of these settings are conspicuously impressive. What this disc
successfully conveys is the intelligence and alertness with which he
makes poetic decisions; he has a quick and precise ear. That said we
open with the rip roarer Yellow Bracken followed immediately
and deliberately in a programming imperative by In What Other Place
Do You Live? This 1941 song to words by Russell Henderson, a contemporary
of Keats, has a quicksilver, circular piano part and an elliptical vocal
line that adds considerable depth and ambiguity to lines that might
otherwise be thought to be rather too Tennysonian for comfort. Its haunting
ethos is conveyed in the most simple and most sparing way whilst being
also the most effective. Love’s Secrets strikes me as rather
generically romanticised for all the poignancy of the last line. Keats’
abiding sense of late Romantic conviction is conveyed in The Orange
Tree – this is less mystic than heightened in feeling with a very
pretty piano part, and very rewarding to hear. The Sea-Wraith brings
with it strong and salient hints of Debussy, modified by Keats’ temperament
into something somewhat more forthright, less vulnerable; how admirably
he makes the telling caesura in the line Drew back as she passed
them by.
Keats was alive to different influences. Chinoiserie
haunts Galleons with its chiming piano part whereas We sat
entwined has a lush and luxuriant piano part with a postlude of
especial beauty. Sun After Rain is a rather declamatory affair
with a busy – and eloquent – accompaniment that thins to rapt simplicity
in the last line. The Celtic happily haunts White Heather, a
winning piece of balladry full of faerie doings but a stronger and deeper
mark is made in Of Old, On Her Terrace At Evening in which the
composer may be evoking, in the tragic tread of the piano part, something
of the pain of the loss of his son, killed in action in the War. So
Keats can cover the compositional ground, from quasi-impressionistic
to ballad, to art song, all the while illuminated by a romantic sensibility
quickly responsive to texts that can be allusive but are never obscurantist.
Thus the setting of the Christina Rossetti poem that gives this disc
its title. With its obbligato violin – very Paolo Tosti - this flirts
with the generic but embraces the popular with aplomb in the same way
that a song like The Point of Noon embraces the mantle of impressionism
but ultimately distances itself from the full implications of it. He’s
also a clever setter; in Fear, which uses prose by Montaigne,
Keats characterises the fears of the rich and poor in dramatic fashion
– the busy and stern writing for the Rich and the jaunty indifference
of the writing for the Poor. Which precisely mirrors the text in a way
both subtle and illuminating.
Only occasionally does Keats sink to the whimsical
or generic; equally seldom does he aspire to other models – in Once
I Could Sit By The Fire Hour Long there is a barely concealed Schubertian
start, and layering of a ground bass that solemnly tolls. The internal
fissures of the poem are conveyed through an equally dramatic musical
syntax – silences and dramatic outburst before a final consolatory sense
of return. But as if to show that Keats was a roisterer as much as an
introvert the disc ends with Drake’s Call – Stanfordian to a
T. The booklet is well laid out and designed. Texts and notes are attractive
and the biographical details of Keats’ life elegantly detailed. Evocative
sepia tinted photographs grace the pages. As to the performers, well
they lack finesse but succeed in conveying much of Keats’ energy and
sensitivity. To that extent they are, if not trail blazers (because
some of his songs have been recorded before), at least what I hope will
be the advance guard that brings more Keatsian delights to the listening
public.
Jonathan Woolf
see previous review
by Rob Barnett
Wendy Dixon (sop) * 