The Fractured Rapture of Impassioned Imperfection: Dame Sarah Connolly in Recital at Wigmore Hall
Fervent renderings made for a hybrid of spectacular and spent notes in the mezzo’s sentiment-rich concert beside pianist Joseph Middleton.
Dame Sarah Connolly. Credit: Christopher Pledger
Succumbing to the summons of emotional surrender, fearful limbs fall prey to their prevailing quivers; veiling shock with shelter’s shivers. Fending off a physical offence, the body bows down to emboldened throbs grown uncontrollable. Vocal instruments meet vacillations similar in song enfevered by the brilliance of music: brash vibratos threatening to sabotage mellifluous motifs and climaxes.
It is the danger dealt all singers geared-up to ingress confessionals in solo concerts. Ventures into top notes become turbulent at triumphs of expression; pressing on to ply piano chords with collapsing crowning moments. In a recital rife with effervescent charm Dame Sarah Connolly invited listeners into composers’ otherworldly realms; regaling lingering crescendos with unchecked intensity – some of whose passion pinched a near-immaculate technique.
Spectral portents scaled the keys of the piano at the start of Samuel Barber’s “Rain has fallen”; luring us into a ruling sense of ominous uncertainty at player Joseph Middleton’s command. Expert glissandi glittered through the picturesque depiction of nostalgia’s suffocation set to verses by James Joyce as Connolly imbued her burgeoning top register with burnishing vibrato; exuding alternating rounds of crude and crisply finished notes. In Barber’s “Sleep Now” slippery diminuendos could be heard but testy intervals across his work “I hear an army” were more steadily sustained.
Mark Anthony Turnage’s 2020 Songs of Sleep and Regret made for dives into dissonance as disharmony tugged at the rhythms of semi-made melodies. Dispersed almost haphazardly, the chords across these crestfallen displays of loss – set to verses by Emily Dickinson, Stevie Smith, Thomas Hardy, James Joyce and Shakespeare – present immemorable immersions into disorientation; staccato scattergrams of spirit.
Connolly coped well with the demanding pace throughout “Remorse is Memory awake” and offered the Bard’s Sonnet 83 impressively performed melismas. In Thomas Hardy’s “To an unborn Pauper Child” the mezzo mused on fading days throughout “Hopes dwindle; yea”, but likewise lined it with a hard-earned accent of crescendo. A trill unravelled splendidly in “Roses” by George Eliot but Stevie Smith’s “Farewell” bade Connolly switch registers abruptly from the nasal resonance of deep contralto to a squeaky silver high-pitched range.
Sumptuousness pumped the premier notes of Chausson’s opening to “Poème de l’amour et de la mer” as Middleton manipulated right hand chords till they were pregnable to tinkling under passion’s taunts. Employing crystalline French diction for the most part of “La fleur des eaux”, Connolly made errors by confusing “s’embraser” (“to catch flame”) with “l’embraser” (“to light it”) and pronouncing the French “qui” (a “ki” sound) at one point like the Italian one (“kwi”).
Zeal oozed without restraint into her treatment of this lyrical sublimity; allowing notes across her bottom register to ease with smoothness over “Quel son lamentable et sauvage” (“What a pitiable and barbaric sound”). Flowing languorously and then stormily like currents’ unenvisageable course, the mezzo’s instrument curved in vicissitudes of steel strength (as on “l’angoisse de mon cœur” – “the anguish of my heart”) and sabotaging bursts of unrestrained dynamics.
Excursions to exquisiteness were Middleton’s chromatic scales throughout; evolving into limber glimmers in the poem’s Interlude. In the dwindling of his digits’ deft diminuendi could be heard a gallery of destinies long lost to destitution. As he launched into “La mort de l’amour” (“The death of love”) the pianist displayed a heap of orderly successive chords that overlapped as neatly as the petals on a peony. Connolly’s eventual extinction of full notes ranged from swift scraps to slower dissolutions; filling the work’s filigree of ornaments with laps of turmoil of both regulated and ill-reigned vocality.
Slurs settled into well-honed territory as the singer began Schoenberg’s song “Erwartung”; reeling off a better-helmed vibrato at the “küsst” in “Und er küsst sie” (“and he kisses her”). Graven tones in “Schenk mir deinen goldenen kamm” (“Gift me your golden comb”) secured a beautifully buttressed, stern address in “Schenk mir Alles, was du hast” (“Give me everything you have”); enrobing love-endowed commands with peak possessiveness.
Flexing like a sensual pitch-bend into Kurt Weill’s wartime ditties, Connolly supplied “My Ship” from stage musical Lady in the Dark with ardour’s supplicant; enamelling “My ship’s aglow with a million pearls” in enamoured traces of diminuendo. Despondency was made meticulously resonant in “Trouble Man” from 1949’s Lost in the Stars – which saw the mezzo render the phrase, “All day long you don’t catch me weeping… but oh, God help me when it comes time for sleeping” with a longing doom-consumed. Rubato lent the riffs a manner of improvisation heard in songs like “Fever” in the singer’s comfortable assumption of the era’s decadence.
In stirrings similarly seamless Connolly performed Weill’s “Je ne t’aime pas” (“I don’t love you”) with commanding mastery and sturdy steers of tough recitatives’ reticulations. The parlando (semi-spoken) parts – such as “Et si elle t’aimait bien” (“And if she loved you well”) emerged sarcastically spiteful in the voice of the scorned lover, ceding to the verses subsequent with unsealed venom. Its display made for incomparable characterisation by a malleable vocal artist.
Enmeshed in messy episodes and marvels, this was a performance that perfused effulgence unreservedly: a series of examples of the pinnacles and slip-ups that result from setting free your soul.