Tony and Tania Music Prize
Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Glasgow
Competitions are part of the process of becoming a performing musician, a stressful part of the student experience but useful training for the audition and casting world that lies ahead. For the music fan, they can be an altogether more relaxed opportunity to hear music that is a little outside the mainstream repertoire.
The annual Tony and Tania Music Prize at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland has specific qualities that ensure this. Now overseen by the daughter of the couple whose music-filled life endowed it, it focuses on piano or voice on alternate years, and always on the music of Russia, the homeland of Tania’s father.
This year two sopranos, a mezzo and bass competed and the adjudicator was RCS graduate and former Scottish Opera Emerging Artist, Russian baritone Alexey Gusev, so the singers’ grasp of the language was as much under scrutiny as the notes.
Many of the composers were very familiar – Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Rachmaninoff and Shostakovich all featured – and two, Valentin Silvestrov and Sofia Gubaidulina, are still with us, and the singers responded to the challenge with a vast range of material, even if their brief programmes shared some structural similarities.
Most obviously that was in ending with their most theatrical song. For mezzo Luca-Zsuzsana Cerveni that was the third of Mussorgsky’s Songs and Dances of Death, Trepak. Silvestrov’s I’m Drinking to Mary had showcased the rich low notes of her register, but her two Shostakovich songs, the Eastern folk-music inflected Farewell, Granada, and the sinister Lullaby with its cabaret piano line were the boldest choices.
Soprano Mariana Rybakova Crespo Da Silva also had a farewell song, Glinka’s Farewell to St Petersburg, in her set, its yearning and beautiful piano part from Max McWhirter (who had also accompanied Cerveni) following Rachmaninoff’s lovely Lilacs. The young soprano had opened with the relative simplicity of a traditional Cossack Lullaby (very unlike the Shostakovich) and a Rimsky-Korsakov aria from The Snow Maiden, surely an opera-house audition piece. Her conclusion was two songs from Mussorgsky’s Nursery Cycle, a monologue to a naughty doll and then a lively duet with herself as both nanny and recalcitrant child.
Alex White has the resonant bottom notes in his range to do justice to the most distinctive Russian choral music. His dramatic closer was Anton Arensky’s The Wolves, and the brief Tchaikovsky song that preceded it, My Genius, My Angel, My Friend, was beautifully shaped.
The real treat in his set, however, was his opening trio of three of the nine songs setting Robert Burns by Georgy Sviridov. The familiar cadences of John Anderson, my Jo and Rantin’, Rovin’, Robin were compellingly reimagined by composer and performers (Elina Purina providing the piano), especially the setting of the latter to an Eastern folk rhythm.
In the end, however, there could be little quibbling with Gusev’s decision that the closing performance by soprano Anna Marmion took this year’s prize. Marmion and her pianist Valeri Ayvazyan had the most dynamic relationship of the afternoon, and her voice is already in full bloom. Her thematic linking of her choices perhaps wouldn’t stand close scrutiny but the musical flow from Tchaikovsky’s Sleepless Nights through Rachmaninoff’s Summer Nights to Gubaidulina’s evocative Aeolian Harp, from her 1956 Phacelia cycle, was brilliantly conceived, and her highly accessible closer, Alexander Alyabyev’s The Nightingale, was a showpiece full of bold leaps and stratospheric coloratura.
Marmion has a busy spring to look forward to at the Alexander Gibson Opera School, singing Vespina in Haydn’s L’infedelta delusa next month and the Queen of the Night in Die Zauberflote in March. She’s well worth making plans to hear.
Keith Bruce
Pictured (L-R): Anna Marmion, Alex White, Mariana Rybakova Crespo Da Silva, and Luca-Zsuzsana Cerveni