Neither Poulenc’s astringent Le Travail du Peintre nor Britten’s stark Songs and Proverbs of William Blake is an easy listen and it was brave of Simon Keenlyside to venture both.
The Poulenc cycle, though (text by Paul Éluard), presents an intriguing gallery of painters: gravity-defying Chagall, hyperactive Klee, domineering Picasso. Keenlyside’s reading was suitably graphic if a little heavy-handed.
Britten’s Blake cycle too was more notable for its vision of urban misery than for its tender depiction of nature, and Keenlyside’s burnished baritone was heard to better advantage in Schumann’s more ingratiating Kerner Lieder. Perhaps the Verdi and Wagner he’s undertaking these days are to blame, but it was the evocations of stormy nights, roaring tempests and impassioned if unfulfilled love that scored highest.
Keenlyside’s restless stage manner is barely congruent with the meticulous precision required for lieder and too few textual nuances were relished. In Auf das Trinkglas he lost his way, saved only by the quick thinking of Malcolm Martineau, his impeccably responsive accompanist.
This was an impressive and enjoyable recital. And yet, as Kerner himself so aptly puts it, “If you try to force a song, it will seldom succeed.”
