Review by Simon Jenner, July 9 2025
A quiet ravishing attends the opening of this unusual but inspired pairing of voice and guitar at St Nicholas. It’s a very traditional pairing but not so often heard.
Emily Jennings, a 2023-24 Britten/Pears artist. is a pure-toned soprano with a voice that encompasses far more than lyrics. Cassandra Mathews is a consummate guitarist, a first-class graduate of the Royal College of Music. They’re also stepping in at short notice but Jennings says this is her favourite recital space.
They start as they mean to go on. This is very much a Britten-themed recital, as before a recent graduate. Britten arranged the haunting folksong ‘I will give my love an apple’ here with guitar too (originally Pears and Julian Bream) though it can be sung solo. This established the shimmering summer space that folksongs sometimes establish in a blaze of noon… it’s a timeless piece with touches of ancient modal infections.
We moved to the real ancient with three John Dowland songs. Dowland (1563-1626) composed like Thomas Champion many kits sings.
‘Flow My Tears’ is perhaps his most famous with a full scena of lament and a cascading scale down enacting weeping. Jennings allows her voice it’s power here. ‘Shall I Sue’ seems a regret but there’s a playful eds in seeking forgiveness almost, and Jennings knows how to swing this too. It’s an arch and agile song. Finally ‘Come heavy sleep’ returns to the “semper Dowland semper dolans” always morose mode. But there’s a shift of weariness as befits the song. It’s not quite as well known as the other two but famous. A superbly sung trio .
Vaughan Williams allows Jennings a fuller range of Romantic inflection. Three songs starts with ‘The sky above the roof’ a piece much better known these past 20 years, a lyric soaring piece, though kit with the agile kick of ‘Kinden Lea’s which as ever is a delight of place and belonging. Finally a great arrangement of ‘The Turtle Dove’ which sounds folksy but is pure VW pentatonic and all. A passionate love song of yearning and hope it’s rapturously delivered.
Jennings affirms her love of folksong as the heart of what she does. ‘Scarborough Fair’ is one of the best known and the most mysterious when you attend its lyrics. Mathews has arranged today and given a superb instrumental accompaniment with a hurdy gurdy element. It’s also remarkably varied in texture. Jennings plunges into this with a sense of its impossibility. The tasks the ex-lover sets their former true love to become their lover again sound quite designed to put them off. Why challenge them if they dumped you? They’d not be remotely interested. And if you dumped them why would you ask, and by proxy too? Jennings get across the strange paradoxical intent here and finesse it down with Mathews and her remarkably imaginative quicksilver shifts.
Lennox Berkeley (1903-89) was a great friend of Britten’s and like Auden as rather in love with him. He’s miserably underrated now, but Britten knew his worth. ‘Full Moon’s is a haunted lunar meditation. Slow and as often with the moon, rapt, distracted. A gem.
Britten’s Songs From the Chinese aren’t that often performed because of the Pears/Bream combo being slightly out of fashion as well as his late 1950s-1960s song output. Songs translated by Arthur Waley from the great Tang period come over well.
They’re brief. ‘The Big Chariot’ is a laconic warning and full of those repeated phrases mid-Britten arches and played in. ‘The Old Lute’ is by contrast a slow melisma of sliding down and up, invoking even more “ancient melody” than the song and poem.
There’s a sense Britten here has learned a touch from Anton Webern and the Second Viennese School. He has been prevented from studying with Berg. This song with its sparse accompaniment does recall what else was happening in the musical world. It also invoked Constant Lambert’s Eight Songs if Li Ip. Not perhaps that Britten would have acknowledged that!
‘The Autumn Wind’ is a fleet and skittering piece recalling some of the sped and velocity found in ‘Winter Words’. It’s all far more pointillistic. A remarkable song with its sudden switchbacks of direction, like Britten and the wind itself, it seems almost to come from an opera.
‘The Herd Boy’ is a character piece, with a jazzy accompaniment – with Jennings using plenty of chest register and wonderful spin top notes. ‘Depression’ is another adagio piece starting with the soprano, only touched in by the guitar. These songs even with the soaring soprano line, sound distinctly more modern. Britten and Bream capture something of the Age of Cool, whether they meant to or not. Bream might well have thought the same.
‘Dance Song’ is a sprightly extent number full of unicorns… and comic swoops down from Jennings. It’s pointed, witty, and a mock-lament with that comic slide down from high “Alas for the unicorns” is delicious and a true chuckle.
‘Sailor Boy’s ends as we began with a Britten film arrangement – appropriate as St Nicholas is the patron saint id sailors notes. Who also notes this is really meant to be sung by a man. But in this gender fluid works surely a detail! An active assertive piece full of braggadocio and sky quotes from shanties. It’s a great built-in encore. Quite the most exhilarating song recital in months.
