Those who know Stevenson only from the Passacaglia
on DSCH or from the First Piano Concerto of 1959-60 will be well
advised to lend an ear to these songs. The bulk consists of seventeen
poems that comprise Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden
of Verses but all thirty-five compiled here are full of incident
and interest, full of lyrical flowering and, where necessary,
a distinct shudder. In Bed in Summer the piano seems to
shadow the vocal line with innocent insistence whereas in The
Land of Nod a depth of interior projection is conveyed
through sparingly intense means. Stevenson employs a freely melismatic
moment on the words Nod and Dreams. He deepens the mood in the
second unaccompanied verse and becomes darker and more intense
in the third, mirroring the suggestive lines but imbuing them
with an even greater sense of ambiguity and interiority before
returning suddenly to the frisky mood of the opening. The concision
and apposite changeability with which Stevenson sets this little
poem, less than two minutes long, is a sign not only of compositional
astuteness but also of emotional identification with the child’s
view of the world.
Stevenson is not afraid to emphasise the powerful
sound of nature, such as the pitter-patter of the rain in the
poem of that title, its onomatopoeic insistence one of drizzly
certainty, or the breathless battening of the wind in Windy
Nights. The blatancy of these depictions – visual and dramatic
– seems to mirror in moments of tense concentration the child’s
seemingly magnified intensity of sensory feeling. Thus in a setting
like Shadow March the fear is all the more exacting for
being underplayed ("All around the house is the jet black
night;/ It stares through the window pane;"). Until, that
is, it’s unleashed in the most insinuating way imaginable – a
repeated tramp, tramp, tramp emphasised by the piano’s
cruelly indifferent raps. Then there’s the chordal heroism of
the piano part in the burgeoning beginning Summer Sun. How
eloquently Stevenson responds to his namesake’s second verse,
where the composer emphasises the sun’s benevolence and not its
blistering glory – and the final chordal flourish seems to dazzle
us anew with its all enveloping warmth. Stevenson gives us the
railway rhythm of From a Railway Carriage as well as the
luxurious languor of Autumn Fires. Susan Hamilton’s soprano
is exactly right for this music; unknowing, keenly boyish, dead
centre-of-the-note, it has a perfect foil in John Cameron’s pianism,
which is superbly nuanced and characterised.
The companion songs take poems by Hugh MacDiarmid
and William Soutar and one by Sorley MacLean. There’s the rhythmically
bracing The Robber, a Ravelian Hill Sang
complete with its nature tracery in the piano part and much wit
in The Buckie Braes. His simplicity always carries a lyric
charge – witness the beautiful setting of To the Future –
but skittishness, a certain frolicsomeness is also part of the
lexicon of Stevenson’s response to the poems as one can hear in
the delightful Hallowe’en Sang The Day is Düne
has a lullaby simplicity to it, a gentleness and becalming
generosity that make it an especially attractive setting. The
recital ends with the lyric that gives this disc its title – an
absolutely beautiful song.
There are some fine notes by Colin Scott-Sutherland
and full texts are printed. These songs capture the wideness of
Stevenson’s imagination and its charm and punch; their fast rhythms
and lullaby cadences add depth and thoughtfulness, amplifying,
refracting and complementing the poets’ lines in a way that enriches
and moves.
Jonathan Woolf
see also Review
by Rob Barnett (Recording of the Month May03)
and Colin
Scott-Sutherland (Disc of the Year)
Susan
Hamilton (soprano)