Tore Art Gallery, Tore, 17 September 2011

AT THE risk of getting myself into trouble, performances by soprano and piano bring to mind the old adage about buses. You wait for ages for one to come along, then several come at once!

Also remember the immortal description of the omnibus by Flanders and Swann as a “transport of delight”. And this year we have been transported with delight firstly by Moira Harris and Steve Jones, then by Anush Hovhannisyan and Artem Akopyan, and most recently on Saturday evening in a charity event at Tore Gallery on the Black Isle in aid of the British Heart Foundation, by Liz McLardy and Anne McIntyre.

Anne McIntyre and Liz McLardy

Liz and Anne prepared a programme dedicated to the women in music, subtitled “From Mimi to Minelli”; catchy and apt, but some of the finest songs they performed predated Mimi by a considerable time. For example, the opening song ‘V’adoro, pupille’ was by Handel, from Guilio Cesare, with Cleopatra disguised as her own servant presenting herself to Caesar as Virtue. This was Liz McLardy in formal mode, and her voice rang out through the Gallery, a converted church with an acoustic well suited to singing.

By contrast ‘Lucy’s Conversation’ from Menotti’s one act opera The Telephone is very nearly contemporary with the birth of Liza Minelli. Liz had switched into comic mode, but the pace demanded by the libretto put a strain on the clarity of diction required. It is a phenomenally difficult song to get absolutely right and while many of the words were lost, the humour of the piece came over well.

Pianist Anne McIntyre had a pair of solo spots before the interval, the first of which, Debussy’s ‘Girl with the Flaxen Hair’ seemed to have a slightly uneven, almost staccato rhythm that emphasised the phrasing rather than the flow of the music. To end the first half, Anne played ‘The Maiden and the Nightingale’ from Granados’s set of musical pictures, Goyescas. It was fuelled by the passion of the Spanish heat, but was quite a descriptive piece that could well be used a part of a film score.

Between these two piano solos, Liz gave us four more songs from her versatile repertoire, a Mozart pastiche, ‘Little Polly Flinders’, from an anthology of nursery songs by J Michael Diack, then a haunting and unaccompanied ‘Somewhere Over The Rainbow’ that was made famous by Judy Garland in the film The Wizard of Oz.

It was a natural progression to go from Garland to her daughter Liza Minelli for the title song from the film Cabaret. With the prop of a spangly jacket, Liz gave a powerful delivery that ranged as necessary from swing to poignancy. Reference to her friend Elsie being “the happiest corpse I’ve ever seen” made the flashback of nearly three centuries to Dido’s Lament ‘When I am laid in earth’ from Purcell’s early opera Dido and Aeneas seem chronologically normal, although Sally Bowles’ pathos was skilfully replaced by a true feeling of sadness.

The second half started with ‘Pirate Jenny’ from Kurt Weill’s Threepenny Opera, one of the most outstanding operatic works of the 20th century. It is often said that this popular work is almost impossible to cast as it needs actors who can sing, or singers who can act, and seldom do the two come together. Liz hit it off nicely with plenty of expressive performance. My sight-line was not good, but it appeared as if she had added a red bandana and a blue apron as props, perhaps using a bit of theatrical licence with the idea of looking like a pirate, whereas in the opera it is a song performed by Polly Peachum to entertain the guests at her wedding to Mack The Knife.

Then came another anomaly, a soprano singing the tenor aria ‘Maria’ from Bernstein’s West Side Story. It was sung unaccompanied and was full of passion and emotion, but somehow the words fell awkwardly coming from a female mouth.

The Minelli of the show’s title came out in the first half. Now it was the turn of the other featured name, Mimi. Few people do not know Puccini’s La Boheme and its heroine Mimi, the role that has everything – poverty, great tunes, possessive love and fatal consumption. And who does not know the ubiquitous ‘Mi chiamano Mimi’? A brave choice to include such a well-known song, but Liz sang it with just the right level of emotion to please all her audience.

Two songs by Samuel Barber gave the audience food for thought.  ‘Must the winter come so soon’ is from a somewhat dark opera called Vanessa, the libretto for which was by Menotti, but it lacks all the humour of The Telephone.  ‘Solitary Hotel’ is a rather tragic song from Barber’s suite Desperate and Still, setting to music words from Ulysses by James Joyce. This song is the reaction to hearing the news of a friend’s suicide.

A piano solo by Anne McIntyre of a Prelude and Fugue by the Norwegian composer Trygve Madsen was inspired by Bach, but had a jazzed up feel to it. Then the final song in the programme was a convincing delivery of the famous ‘Casta Diva’ from Bellini’s Norma, the epitome of all bel canto arias, in which Liz hit all the high notes with minimal vibrato and absolute ease.

For an encore, Liz and Anne took things full circle and back to the composer with whom they had started the evening, Handel.  ‘Care selve’ from Atalanta is a well known item in practically all soprano repertoires and with it the audience left with the feeling of an evening well spent.

© James Munro, 2011