Any composer who wants to make a setting of English poetry must yearn to have it sung by Roderick Williams. No singer working today delivers such texts with more consummate clarity and understanding, and the latest work written for him tests those gifts to the maximum. It was hearing Williams in recital that prompted Howard Skempton to accept a commission to compose a setting of Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner for him, with an accompaniment of piano quintet, double bass and horn.
Skempton’s version lasts around 35 minutes. He’s made some judicious cuts in the lengthy ballad – a few verses here and there in the opening sections, more substantial ones towards the end of the poem, some of which are signalled by short instrumental interludes, the only ones in the entire work. But he was also at pains to preserve Coleridge’s rhyming quatrains in his setting, and the vocal lines often have a modal feel to them, as if the poem were being refracted through the pastoral world of early 20th-century English music.
Yet the direct, unornamented way of treating the text also recalls a very different model: Satie’s “symphonic drama” Socrate. There’s a cool detachment about the way Skempton keeps the poem at a distance and never over-dramatises it, and a wonderful economy about the way he touches in the instrumental accompaniment, often with just a single line, and only occasionally uses the whole ensemble; the focus is always very much on Williams’s lucid spinning of the narrative, which is as eloquent as you would expect.
The baritone had featured throughout the first half of the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group concert too, in a group of songs from Dominic Muldowney’s English Songbook. With an ensemble (conducted by the composer) that echoes the Berlin cabaret bands of the Weimar years, the sound sometimes takes on a strange, un-English flavour, especially in the settings of Edward Thomas’s Adlestrop, John Betjeman’s Uffington and AE Housman’s Smooth Between Sea and Land, but they do focus attention on the texts in a genuinely original way.
