The birds and the B flats
A celebration of fauna in song
For A Musical Zoo (left), his new disc with pianist Joseph Middleton, bass-baritone Ashley Riches has explored how composers over the centuries have celebrated a range of creatures, from the flea and the cockroach to the cow and the crocodile, in song.
‘I did at some point count the number of animals that appear in
A Musical Zoo, and it is somewhere around 50,’ Riches tells BBC Music. ‘As a massive animal fan – I’m very much a cat person, in particular – I have spent some time thinking about what exactly they represent for us as people. I then thought I’d explore that in musical terms and see where it got me. There are songs about our relationship with them and to what degree they are our companions and helpers – Barber’s The Monk and his Cat is a lovely, friendly manifestation of that, Schumann’s Die Löwenbraut (The Lion’s Bride) decidedly less so!
And then you have songs about how animals act as inspiration for human activity when we see and hear them out in the world: Brahms’s An die Nachtigall
(To a Nightingale), for instance, or Howells’s King David, which also features a nightingale.
‘Another type of song, meanwhile, investigates the nature of the animals themselves. The prime example here is Ravel’s Histoires naturelles, in which all of the writing is designed to evoke the movement and behaviour of animals. And finally, you have animals used as images of human nature, as in the beautiful romantic relationship portrayed in Fauré’s Le papillon et la fleur (The butterfly and the flower) or the futility of human striving expressed in Shostakovich’s Once there lived a cockroach.
‘As I explored, I became aware of a relationship between animals and music – namely, that each of them represents life in its non-verbal form. Both of them display emotions, movement, directions and intentions, but somehow remain elusive and mysterious to us.’
A Musical Zoo is out now on Chandos