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From "Musikfreunde "
[the magazine of the Musikverein, Vienna]
September/October 2007 (Sabine M. Gruber)
Translated by Ursula Turecek
A Song – For Anything!
Gerald Finley and Julius Drake
“A Song – For Anything”... That’s the name of the CD with songs of the American composer Charles Edward Ives that Gerald Finley and Julius Drake recorded together. In their concert at the Musikverein they will perform some of these songs, as much unknown as they are gorgeous, and in other respects the contrary of – anything too.
[Click the photo for details of the CD]
Charles Ives was a very original composer, actually an insurance broker who wrote music in his leisure time only, among other things about 200 songs. At times he composed his songs in an extremely comical way. In a way you should by no means compose, according to him. The method: He took his inspiration from a poem, quite often from one that he had written himself. Then he set the poem for chamber ensemble and a solo instrument, for he left out the text! He created, uniquely in musical history, wordless text-settings. „The principal reason for this“, Ives wrote, „was, because singers made such a fuss about intervals, time etc. ... when they were arranged later for voice and piano, they were weakened in many cases, also simplified – which I should not have done. This is no way to write a song – but it’s the way I wrote some – take it or leave it, Eddy!“
I can only say: Thank God that these songs were re-arranged for piano and voice. And if “Eddy” could have heard Gerald Finley sing, he presumably would have worried less about his songs and maybe would have left his strange detours. For what Finley is not bound to make is fuss about anything, intervals or time for example; things like difficult intervals or complicated rhythms don’t seem to exist for him. Fuss in general is a word that would never come to my mind in connection with him.
Electrifying virility
I still remember exactly my first encounter with Gerald Finley about ten years ago. Without any fuss he arrived for the first rehearsal of Haydn’s “Creation” with Nikolaus Harnoncourt at the Vienna Musikverein, his characteristic hint of a smile in his eyes. Finley? Never heard [of him]. And suddenly: “Im Anfange schuf Gott Himmel und Erde”. Only a few notes and I felt what an exceptional personality of a singer I had in front of me (in the truest sense of the word, because I stood directly behind him in the chorus). From the very first note this voice electrified me, the tessitura, the voice itself. But it was not only the voice itself I found fascinating. For in the Creation’s third part Gerald turned from Raphael into Adam and finally there was the duet with Eve alias Sylvia McNair. “Holde Gattin, teurer Gatte”, (for choristers) an outmoded languor that drags on eternally. But here stood unexpectedly an Adam who was so virile that he could well afford a little genuine romanticism, and so ingenious that he presumably had reflected seriously about the languor, so seriously that it amused him in the end – in view of a congenial Eve who returned Adam’s humorously serious winking with devotion and with confident and superior femininity. However, the fusty duet turned into a gorgeous, completely modern flirtation. I was: enchanted. Cross my heart. No question that this Adam with this Eve had exactly hit upon Haydn’s humour. Oh, this must be a really good lieder singer, I thought. And had to be patient for six years till I could hear his first recital at Musikverein, accompanied by Julius Drake.
[Click photo for details of the CD]
Ambivalent mixture
Whether he makes the trumpets of the Last Judgement in Handel’s “Messiah” sound or tells us the most secret of all secrets there, whether he interprets Mozart’s timeless Don Giovanni on the operatic stage or gives an ultra-modern, contemporary, Doctor Atomic (alias J. Robert Oppenheimer) in John Adam’s and Peter Sellars’ opera of the same title, his world premiere – he always does so amazingly, without difficulty and without any fuss. His voluminous bass voice can produce enormous volume easily, fill concert halls and opera houses, in an un-agitated, self-controlled way, on an almost endless breath and with amazing calm. It can be piercing, mighty, even martial, but in the next moment tender, velvety, gentle again. The voice is expression of a personality that is carried by energy, filled with poetry and interwoven with spiritual power, a combination that rarely can be found in one and the same singer. This ambivalent mixture gives the distinctive timbre to the voice; it causes a breathtaking tension in the listener and these: goose bumps.
To experience Gerald Finley’s harmonious and contradictory personality you don’t necessarily have to fly to Amsterdam to the Europe-premiere of “Doctor Atomic” and jet to Salzburg afterwards to experience his Count in Mozart’s “Figaro” and then hasten to Vienna to hear him in his showpiece-role Don Giovanni. No, it is completely enough to listen to a recital: Gerald Finley in the essence and in highest concentration.
Two masters
By now, songs take a very important space in the life of the born Canadian who has lived in Great Britain since his studies at King’s College and the Royal College of Music (where he is working as a guest lecturer now), married to singer Louise Winter and father of two adolescent sons. However, a strong musical affinity to Northern America has remained, alongside a tendency to the British, French and Russian song treasures. After the Ives songs, a CD with songs by Samuel Barber will appear soon. And this time again Julius Drake is his accompanist – or should I say: his duettist? Gerald Finley and Julius Drake are amazingly equal musicians. Between them there is a balance of power that the listener can experience in the combination singer/song accompanist only rarely in immediacy. Maybe this is because the two of them have as much in common regarding their inner tempo, their temperament and their musical approach as a singer and a pianist can have.
In “Swimmers” by Charles Ives you can experience this trial of strength in an exemplary and very close fashion. Drake plays the sea and Finley sings the swimmer who antagonises this elemental force. “I felt the sea’s vain pounding”, it says in the end, “and I grinned knowing, that I was its master, not its slave.” The swimmer, wildly determined, defeats the sea that, no less determined, carries him intuitively: a victory that remains temporary has to be achieved in every song anew: a challenge that singer and pianist seem to relish in equal measure. However, in the end there are always two masters. And far and wide no slave.
Not just anything
“A Song – For Anything”... Ives created this programmatic song in the category “Sentimental Ballad” to illustrate, nay prove “how inferior music is inclined to follow inferior words“ – and vice versa. He took a melody and three verses that were not verses but any texts for anything. A pious church text – for a chant. A sentimental love poem – for a love song. A solemn student speech – for a hymn in honour of Yale University.
Whether Ives’ exercise succeeded? Whether he really supplied evidence that a weak text results in weak music and vice versa? I don’t think so. He rather illustrates one more time what song composers bring to our ears a thousand times: that there are no masters and no slaves in song because the music turns the text, however good or bad it may be, wondrously into something inexplicably else, beyond the sum of its parts.