Evocative recital that was the next best thing to being there
Lucy Crowe and Anna Tilbrook Wigmore Hall, London W1
On many levels, this was a very moving concert. Preceded by the two-minute silence asking us to ponder the violence done to black communities and finishing with an encore of Ivor Novello’s lush wartime romance We’ll Gather Lilacs, soprano Lucy Crowe and pianist Anna Tilbrook gave the second in this month’s sequence of live lunchtime recitals to a Wigmore Hall empty of audience.
Watching on Youtube gave me a lump in my throat. I couldn’t help remembering all the great voices – from Janet Baker to Christian Gerhaher – I’ve heard in that auditorium over the years, and thinking how desperately I longed to be back there, and how nothing one listens to online, on recordings, on radio or television, can match the shared experience of being there with the performers as they create their art. Please may the doors reopen soon.
Meanwhile, one can only be grateful for the next best thing and salute the artists who contribute. These two are old friends: Crowe and Tilbrook have been giving recitals together for two decades now, and they showed an easy yet secure rapport throughout an hour-long programme that broadly fell into two parts: lieder followed by English song.
German does not, I think, come naturally to Crowe and Berg’s Seven Early Songs are perhaps rather heavy fare for a summer lunchtime: neither pianist nor singer dug very deep into their intense Expressionism, and there wasn’t enough differentiation between their different moods. More successful were three songs by Schumann, where Crowe’s ability to impart sheer sensuality in the music she makes was warmly evident in Lied der Suleika and Kennst du das Land?
On home territory, the pair gave nothing but pleasure. A group of folk songs included Britten’s haunting setting of Down by the Salley Gardens, Phyllis Tate’s charming The Lark in the Clear Air and She Moved Through the Fair, unaccompanied, unadorned and heart-stoppingly beautiful in its naked simplicity. Two masterpieces of the early 20th-century repertory followed: Gurney’s elegiac Sleep and Vaughan Williams’s Silent Noon, in which Tilbrook’s sensitive pianism provided eloquent echo to the rapt stillness that Rossetti’s text and Crowe’s shimmering soprano were so evocatively describing.
According to the excellent BBC Radio 3 announcer Andrew Mcgregor, Crowe is giving impromptu recitals outside her London home every evening. I just wish I knew exactly where she lived, because I was left wanting more.