'As with all the best setting of poetry, the words were liberated by the music.'
The above comment in Gramophone Magazine, by Oliver Soden (a writer I much admire), refers to songs by Arthur Keegan, a young composer who was unknown to me until the release of the CD 'The Past & I: 100 Years of Thomas Hardy', with songs composed or arranged by Keegan, and performed by Lotte Betts-Dean (mezzo-soprano), James Girling (guitar) and the Ligeti String Quartet. This disc has created a considerable stir, with a very enthusiastic review from Fiona Maddocks in 'The Observer', a fulsome plug from Georgia Mann on Radio 3's 'Essential Classics', and an exalted place in the 'Classics Chart'.
The poetry of Thomas Hardy forms the focus of the recording. In a fascinating concatenation, Hardy sent Gustav Holst a letter thanking him for some settings of Hardy's poetry Holst had given him. Holst kept the letter in his copy of Hardy's poems and on his death bequeathed the book and the letter to his daughter Imogen; she later gave them to Benjamin Britten, who quite shortly afterwards composed his song cycle 'Winter Words', settings of poems by Hardy. Arthur Keegan discovered this link while undertaking a residency at the Red House (Britten's former home in Aldburgh, now a study centre for the Britten-Pears Foundation) and produced his 'Elegies for Emma', settings of poems Hardy wrote after the death of his first wife.
For this new recording, Keegan rearranged the original piano accompaniment for guitar: a change which brings an additional spareness to songs which are already somewhat introverted and febrile. All the poems in 'Elegies for Emma' are concerned, inevitably, with memory. In particular, these are memories of a ghostly nature: Hardy often imagined his first wife as a ghostly presence: a ghost haunting him and implicitly or explicitly chiding him for past neglect. The master stroke in Keegan's settings is the use of a female voice: Hardy's words echo back to him from the ghostly utterance of his dead wife, save in the one song 'She, to Him' where Emma speaks for herself in words of bitter irony. In this sense, certainly, words are liberated by the music.
The two verses of 'Days to Recollect' begin and end the cycle. Hardy asks if Emma remembers moments of their life together: 'Do you recall/That day is fall?' but receives no answer - by the end of the poem, and the cycle, his questioning takes on an edge of desperation 'Say you remember/ That sad November!' but the rest, as it were, is silence. 'The Walk' is just as inconclusive: 'You did not walk with me' says Hardy, adding with callous detail: 'You were weak and lame'. But after his wife's death, taking the same walk, he notices a difference: 'Only the underlying sense/Of the look of a room on returning thence.' The precise meaning of this is unclear, but we, like Hardy are pensive and unsettled. 'Rain on a Grave' sees Hardy's words spat back at him by a furious female voice:'Clouds spout upon her/Their waters amain/In ruthless disdain -': a rare note of extrovert passion. I found 'I look into my glass' the least effective song in the cycle. Marked as 'Interlude' the idea of the voice reciting the poem over guitar accompaniment is perfectly sound, apart from the fact that singers are often indifferent speakers of verse, and so it proves here, so the effect is underwhelming. By contrast, 'The Voice' one of Hardy's greatest poems, is nothing less than terrifying in this setting: fragments of the text are seized upon and this fragmentation is mirrored by the voice, obsessing and stammering on key words and phrases: 'faltering'; 'forward';'falling'; 'Leaves around me'. 'She, to Him' as I remark above is bitterly ironic and this superb poem deserves to be quoted in full:
Recalls the excellencies I once enshrined,
Remembering that with me lies not the blame,
Knowing me in my soul the very same--
Will you not grant to old affection's claim
The hand of friendship down Life's sunless hill?
Hardy's self-flagellation at his failure to offer that 'hand of friendship' is supremely painful. The second verse of 'Days to Recollect', as discussed previously, brings the cycle to an impressively bleak conclusion.
Keegan is exceptionally well served by his collaborators. James Girling's guitar accompaniment is exemplary, while mezzo soprano Lotte Betts-Dean brings an entirely individual and attractive vocal palette to these songs. Betts-Dean is very much a rising star, (her recording of Stuart McRae's 'Earth thy Cold is Keen', gathered rave reviews and she is the recipient of multiple honours and awards). Her voice certainly has several admirable qualities, including an arrestingly smoky timbre, notable purity of sound, with little or no vibrato when required, and instinctive musicality. I find her enunciation of text lazy but as her voice sounds rather instrumental in this music, with a range of tone colours and as she adds something otherworldly and intangible through this varied tone, that is not as serious an issue as it might be elsewhere. She certainly suits this particular repertoire as to the manner born and delivers it with distinction.
As for the rest of this recital, settings of Hardy by other composers, with guitar accompaniment arranged by Arthur Keegan, some items were familiar to me, but others were new discoveries. To begin with known quantities. 'At the Railway Station - Upway' from Britten's 'Winter Words' suffers from over interpretation. Here, Betts-Dean's diction is, ironically, given my previous remarks, rather too emphatic, making the boy with the violin, offering to play for the hand-cuffed convict, sound rather knowing, which surely cannot be what Hardy or Britten intended. Robin Milford's delightful 'If It's Ever Spring Again' is given a suitably fresh, exhuberant performance and the two Finzi settings, 'The Too Short Time' and 'Shortening Days' are thoughtfully performed even if I find the tempi chosen overly deliberate. It is surprisingly rare to find Finzi's Hardy settings sung by female voices but Betts-Dean shows there is no good reason for this and I hope other mezzos and sopranos follow her lead. In this, more main-stream repertoire, her voice takes on an added vibrancy with quite generous vibrato. A certain rawness on some top notes indicates she is not quite the finished product and overall her singing suggests she should be careful in choosing new assignments, particularly where opera is concerned. Having said this, she is clearly already a fine artist.
This impression is reinforced by some more unfamiliar repertoire. Imogen Holst's 'Weathers' is very attractively performed, with the guitar accompaniment underlining the composer's Elizabethan influences. Derek Holman's 'Midnight on the Great Western' while not as spookily arresting as Britten's setting, was a welcome discovery, as was Muriel Herbert's 'Faintheart in a Railway Train' a good example of 'words...liberated by the music' - fascinating that she was Claire Tomalin's mother - the sympathetic setting of one of Hardy's less inspired efforts is enhanced by the addition of a string quartet providing the ostinato echoing the monotonous sound of the train. By contrast, Gurney's 'In the Black Winter Morning' adds little to a text which is notably bleak even by Hardy's standards, although Betts-Dean and Girling do their best with it. For me, the most welcome discovery was Kerry Andrew's 'The Echo Elf Answers', commissioned by Arthur Keegan for this project. This superbly macabre question and answer song is compelling delivered by singer and guitarist - it deserves a place in the 21st century song repertoire.
The final piece in the programme, Keegan's 'String Quartet No 1 "Elegies for Tom"', brings Hardy himself centre -stage. There is an ingenious and very moving connection made between Hardy's poem 'Afterwards', and Larkin's 'The Mower'. Hardy's self-penned epitaph is the line 'He was a man who used to notice such things' and one of the things he noticed was: 'When the hedgehog travels furtively over the lawn' and reflects:
'One may say, "He strove that such innocent creatures should come to no harm
But he could do little for them, and now he is gone."'
Larkin, who admired Hardy profoundly, perhaps had this poem in mind when he wrote 'The Mower'
The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found
A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,
Killed. It had been in the long grass.
I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.
Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world
Unmendably. Burial was no help:
Next morning I got up and it did not.
The first day after a death, the new absence
Is always the same; we should be careful
Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.
Each movement of the Quartet is prefaced by a brief quotation from 'Afterwards' and sections of a setting of 'The Mower' interspersed. The effect is sombre and affecting; the music serious and darkly eloquent. It is a shame that copyright restrictions prevented the printing of this poem in the CD booklet but it is readily available, not least here.
As I grow older, the poetry of Thomas Hardy becomes ever more important to me. I am grateful to all involved in this very welcome recording for the opportunity to revisit some wonderful poems and experience composers' reactions to them. Arthur Keegan's own settings invite comparison with those of Britten and Finzi, and I can think of no higher praise.
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