Ruby brings her sparkle to Mahler

Ruby Hughes Bis

That lovely soprano Ruby Hughes rarely sings in opera, so I don’t have the pleasure of hearing her as often as I would like, but on this fascinating and rewarding recording she gives an impressive demonstration of both the beauty of her voice and the sensitivity of her artistry.

She starts with an enchanting performance of Mahler’s Rückert Lieder. We are used to voices heavier and darker than hers in these wonderful songs, but Hughes’s clean timbre and perfect intonation give them a new dimension – she finds the romantic naiveties in them, suggesting the poignant tragedy of innocence rather than the gloomy lucubrations of experience. The climax of Um Mitternacht brought a lump to my throat, and Liebst du um Schönheit had a warmth and gentleness that was most refreshing. Too much Mahler singing is overburdened with gloom and doom – there is welcome light here.

Berg’s enthralling if gnomic cycle of Altenberg Lieder, a watershed in musical modernism, makes a striking contrast – again one appreciates the sheer clarity of pitch and diction that marks Hughes’s vocalising, as well as her refusal to sentimentalise the phrasing or make an excessive dramatic meal of the lyrics’ import. This is music that calls for a certain restraint and discipline – requirements that both Hughes and the excellent BBC National Orchestra of Wales under Jac van Steen honour rigorously.

The novelty is a work by the 75-year-old Welsh-born composer Rhian Samuel. Hers is a name with which I wasn’t familiar, though the CD brochure reminds me that she enjoyed some prestigious commissions before the millennium (since when she has mostly worked and written as an academic). I would like to hear more.

Clytemnestra dates from 1994 and was first performed by the mezzosoprano Della Jones. A cycle of six songs and an orchestral interlude, this is based on Samuel’s own free translations from Aeschylus’s

Oresteia, and approaches the assassination of Agamemnon from Clytemnestra’s perspective as a mother whose child has been murdered.

It’s a powerful and exuberant work in an idiom that suggests Samuel’s admiration of Berg’s ripe romanticism as well as her involvement with the more acerbic Birtwistle. Some of the music – in the second song in particular – is overblown and flat-footed, but there is a rich and vivid imagination at work here, and Hughes gives it her all.