Live performance, at its best, often moves us. But rarely does it transport the soul to unexplored, emotional perspectives so beautifully, so tragically, so completely as did this concert given by singer and composer Roderick Williams alongside the Carducci Quartet. As the King’s favourite baritone brought his own string arrangement of Die schöne Müllerin to a close with the lullaby to the dead, lovelorn miller he evoked awed silence. Then the rapturous standing ovation it deserved leapt into life across the pews of St Alkmund’s. That hour or so in the world which their collaboration created was one of the most profound and intense musical experiences I’ve ever had. Captivating doesn’t do it justice. No words can.
The Carducci Quartet opened this coup de theatre by the Shropshire Music Trust with an early string quartet by Schubert (‘The Household’), demonstrating why they have become an international byword for craft, musicianship and clarity of tone. Here was a puckish sense of ensemble that caught the rambunctiousness of a youthful Schubert (aged just 16) while pointing towards the bright songfulness of his later work, particularly in its final two movements. Its happy-go-lucky sense of humour, incorporating braying donkeys, buzzing insects and an entertaining battle of the lower strings in the final furlong definitely left our bouche very much amused before the main item.
This was Schubert’s song cycle composed just 10 years later. Die schöne Müllerin (‘The Miller’s Maid’) emanates, however, from quite another emotional universe. In Williams’ re-imagining for voice and quartet instead of piano, we were invited into a one-man mini-opera, exquisitely staged (and sympathetically lit) that opened up this masterwork to fresh reappraisal and innovative scope. In this new pairing, we fell deeper into the Schubertian soundworld, the sinewy turns of lovestruck zeal, anger and despondency somehow even more sincere in the dextrously variegated interplay between voice and instruments (‘Der Muller Blumen’ or ‘Mein!’, just two examples). We heard the omnipresent brook, a Romantic symbol of both constancy and change, characterised in ways that even the very best pianists would struggle to colour with such height and range of tenderness and almost tangible liquid vivacity. The drone (in ‘Der Muller and der Bach’,for instance) came to life too with a plaintive authenticity; its blent air of folk element and art song that pitched naivety against tragic inevitability and which ushered in the Miller’s doom, his love for the indifferent, fickle miller’s daughter still unrequited.
A master storyteller, Williams delivered a tour-de-force performance of huge integrity and shapely, sensitive detail throughout. Each syllable hit home with unparalleled intensity of expression. His baritone shimmered within the superb acoustics of St Alkmunds, indubitably Shrewsbury’s premier classical music venue. He conjured with perfection the concluding lullaby, the death-song of the brook at which we started. What power of communication, what mesmeric control; the warmth of each strophic turn into the relative minor, each repeated after-glow of voice, its fading ardour buoyed upon the thinning consolation of the quartet, current flowing in its final end to nothing. Everywhere hearts brimmed, and shattered.
James Fraser-Andrews
