REVIEWS
AILISH TYNAN soprano JAMES BAILLIEU piano
Wednesday 12 March 2025 7:30pm
Fauré – Cinq mélodies
Hahn – Venezia
Muriel Herbert – Children’s Songs
plus more songs by Herbert, together with Bridge, Barber and Herbert Hughes and traditional folk songs
Irish soprano, Ailish Tynan, has both a beguiling rich soprano voice and a stage presence which is enchanting and warm. She has won numerous accolades in her wide-ranging career and is perhaps best experienced, as here, in recital with one of her eclectic song programmes. James Baillieu is among the very best song pianists of the rising generation and senior
Professor of Ensemble Piano at the Royal Academy of Music.
Their programme starts with French songs by Gabriel Fauré and Reynaldo Hahn on Venetian themes and then turns to explore the children’s songs to poems by Ada Harrison of Muriel
Herbert, Sheffield-born protégé of Roger Quilter. The repertoire broadens to take in 20th century settings by Bridge and Barber, further songs by Murial Herbert and some of the Irish
folk song arrangements by Herbert Hughes with which Ailish Tynan can captivate any audience.
REVIEW BY Chris Skidmore
An exuberant and celebratory evening of song
A song recital by Ailish Tynan is as unlike the caricature of a song recital – all worthy stuffiness – as you are likely to get! It was clear from her exuberance as she arrived on the platform at the Kings Hall, Ilkley on Wednesday that it was only ever going to be a matter of time before she had the Ilkley Concert Club audience eating out of her hand!
The concert began with Fauré’s settings of Verlaine ‘de Venise’ in which Ailish Tynan, having reminded us of the mismatch between the elegance of the poet’s words and the decadence of his life, gave a performance which concentrated on the beautiful lines and elegant text-painting of Fauré’s melodies. The more openly seductive texts of Reynaldo Hahn’s ‘Venezia’ with their exotic settings as barcarolles and tarantellas were responded to with a richer tone and a more Italianate sound which perfectly matched their mood. In both cycles, James Baillieu was the perfect accompanist, matching apparently effortlessly the contrasting styles of the two composers.
The second half began with the charming Six children’s songs of Muriel Herbert in her gentle humorous style. Her later setting of the Lake Isle of Innisfree, with its suggestions of Quilter’s influence, was given an appropriately more mature performance by Ailish and James. This part of the programme focused on Ailish’s native Ireland, with characterful performances of the traditional The Spanish Lady and Marry me now. These were followed by a group of Joyce settings, with Ailish helping the audience through the obscurity of the texts as well as producing powerfully persuasive performances of the songs themselves. The whole was rounded off by exuberant renditions of Libby Larsen’s character piece – Pregnant – and the tongue-twisting traditional Tigaree Torum Orum.
The performers were greeted with inevitably enthusiastic applause from an appreciative audience who had been royally entertained and who were appropriately rewarded by a matchless performance of Hahn’s glorious baroque pastiche, À Chloris.
