CD: My Heart’s in the Highlands
(Delphian)
At first sight, the debut disc from former Scottish Opera Emerging Artist – and fine Albert Herring in the company’s recent production of Britten’s opera – looks a strangely unhip release from a young 21st century tenor, destined to sit among the tartan and shortbread in Scotland’s tourist shops.
Whether or not it finds a home in Edinburgh’s Romanes and Paterson, rather than McAlister Matheson (deceased), that appearance is deceptive. In what turns out to be a very clever and thoughtfully-compiled recital, Glen Cunningham and pianist Anna Tilbrook run from the Romanticism of Robert Schumann’s Burns settings to a box-fresh commission from Cunningham’s fellow Invernesian Stuart MacRae, bracketed by earlier responses to the lyrics of Robert Louis Stevenson, with side steps into Victoriana and arrangements by neglected Scots composer Claire Liddell en route.
The sequencing of the set is masterly, and the selection full of wonderful surprises. Lifting the eight Burns songs for Schumann’s Myrthen and adding the later A Red, Red Rose in Schumann’s German version before Gleadhill’s well-known arrangement as a coda, both introduces the title poem (reprised in its familiar English form at the end of the disc) and establishes the international reach of the Scots.
Victorian soprano Liza Lehmann and early 20th century French composer Reynaldo Hahn approach Stevenson’s Child’s Garden of Verse very differently but Cunningham and Tilbrook give the work of each expressive performances, although the Hahn – written as a stand-alone cycle – is the more musically coherent.
If the whole project was built around the MacRae commission, that is entirely justified. It includes the longest songs on the disc, the composer using two of the well-known Songs of Travel alongside three lyrics from the more esoteric collections, Underwoods. The piano writing for Tilbrook is every bit as compelling as MacRae’s word-setting, already known from his operas to be first-class, and his choices reveal a much less familiar side of Stevenson.
Keith Bruce