As the transcending encore of the infamous ‘Flower Duet’ from Léo Delibes' opera Lakmé filled St Mary’s eaves, I wondered when these young stars might be hitting the big-leagues. In aid of the Ukraine Crisis, this SongEasel charity concert provided an inquisitive programme of iconic song-lets and arias as part of a set of five shows, performed in some of the city’s historic buildings as part of the Oxford Proms this August.
Sparkling Soprano, Anna Fitzgerald opened the concert with a favourite, Schubert’s ‘Ave Maria’, with a lightness and sincerity that seemed to trill among the evening bird song, setting the tone for the rest of the evening’s entertainment.
The next instalment featured a perplexing arrangement of Vaughan William’s ‘Lark Ascending’. With an added intro and outro written by Viola player Tim Perkins, featuring Fitzgerald and Mezzo-Soprano Chloe Pardoe, one was heralded into the familiarly ethereal piece with a brief and ghostly echo-like phrase. As Edmund Jones took to playing the body of the piece, arranged as a duet for his violin and a piano (played sympathetically by Artistic Director Jocelyn Freeman) together they achieved moments of subtlety and intrigue in this stripped-back interpretation. Some of these moments however were jolted awry when Jones seemed to fall under the note which tended to clash with the piano part, though commendation must be given in the mighty undertaking.
The next three French songs, sung by Fitzgerald and accompanied on piano by Estella Roux, oozed nuance and clarity in their musicality and narrative, from Debussy’s ‘Beau Soir’, telling of the soft evening light, to Duparc’s urgent and arresting journey to sleep, to Faure’s Après un Reve, a defiant and pleading ode to a love lost in a dream. The following three short English song-lets sung by Pardoe and accompanied by Daniel Adipradhana, were primed to follow this narrative of dream-state, and lead the listener towards an awakening – and though their performances were faultless, with Pardoe’s tone reminiscent of the legendary Mezzo, Dame Sarah Connolly - their choice of music by Roger Quilter, paired with words by Tennyson and Shelley seemed fleeting and tangled.
After an interval, Fitzgerald and Roux enthralled with two strident and jovial Russian songs by Kos-Anatolskyi which flaunted Fitzgerald’s vocal agility and dynamism. Pardoe and Adiprahana delighted next with three Browning songs by Amy Beach and five uncomplicated and heartfelt German arrangements by Alma Mahler showing an accomplished and playful symbiosis between piano and voice, bringing a wandering sense to the tunes, as though the audience were led through a lavish estate grounds at dusk.
We were also treated to some comical Britten Cabaret songs before a wonderful finale of Schumann’s ‘Bedeckt