Jamie Barton is a star – still rising, but already a proper, bona fide star. Audiences hold her in fierce affection, partly inspired by her glowingly defiant stage presence, something everyone got to see during her Pride flag-waving performance at this summer’s Last Night of the Proms. More than that, though, there’s her voice, the kind of sumptuous velvet-and-steel mezzo-soprano that fills an auditorium seemingly as easily as opening the mouth, used with sharp intelligence.
This programme of songs, featuring more female composers than male, turned up some gems, starting with Elinor Remick Warren’s piece Heather, Barton’s voice tracing smooth, easy sweeps over Kathleen Kelly’s rippling piano. Framing some slightly overwrought works by Amy Beach were one song each from the Boulanger sisters, Lili and Nadia. The muted colours and French vowels of Lili’s Attente drew a darker tone from Barton, who crowned the piece with a high note that sounded aptly vulnerable, yet absolutely controlled.
In Haydn’s Arianna a Naxos, the most substantial and serious work, Barton scaled back in a way that made her haunting cries after Theseus stand out more, not to mention the accusations she hurled at the end. Perhaps, in this, one could have wished for sharper definition from Kelly; but her virtuosity in Libby Larsen’s Love After 1950, taking in boogie-woogie, blues and Spanish habanera, left no such doubts.
Barton and Kelly really sold us these five songs, tracing a woman’s journey towards self-acceptance in a sardonic, entertaining cycle that plays with profundity but doesn’t commit. There was a cheeky drinking song by Ravel and a moment of intensity from Henri Duparc, before Barton finally unleashed the full radiance of her unfettered high notes in Richard Strauss’s Cäcilie. That there was only one encore would have been disappointing had it not been Somewhere Over the Rainbow, which Barton owned: rapt, focused, and singing with just the right amount of rhythmic leeway for her kind of voice. Most singers spend a whole career trying to hit this balance of vocal poise and easy confidence with their audience, and reach it only when the voice is going off the boil. But not Barton.
