VoxCarnyx

Glasgow Art Club

Scots tenor Matthew McKinney already has an impressive CV, roles at English Touring Opera followed by first prize in the Kathleen Ferrier Awards at Wigmore Hall last year and a stint at Carnegie Hall Song Studio in New York. An alumnus of the National Youth Choir of Scotland and the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, he will be one of Glyndebourne’s Jerwood Young Artists this summer, and will make his role debut there as Peter in the premiere of Mark Anthony Turnage’s upcoming opera The Railway Children.

Opportunities to see him in the intimacy of a Wednesday lunchtime Westbourne Music concert may become rare, and a packed house spoke of an awareness of that. With front-rank young pianist Marianna Abrahamyan, now teaching at the RCS, he had devised a memorable recital, the first half of which alternated the songs of Clara and Robert Schumann in a thematic lovers’ exchange that an enterprising record label should have the pair commit to disc at the earliest opportunity.

The Robert Schumann songs suffered not a jot from being lifted from the context of cycles like Leiderkreis and Myrthen, while the strength of his wife’s compositions was amply revealed by their being preceded and followed by his and in no way outshone.

McKinney was at his best at the emotional heart of the sequence, Robert’s Zweilicht and Mondnacht bracketing the rollercoaster of Clara’s Loreley. His voice has a very particular timbre and vibrato uncommon in contemporary tenors – once heard it will surely always be recognisable – and it may not be to all tastes, but he is unafraid to bring his own interpretive style to a score.

That adventurous spirit was even more in evidence in the second half of the recital, which also gave Abrahamyan more opportunity to show her abilities. It began with Frank Bridge’s Love Went A-Riding, a souvenir of McKinney’s Ferrier Award-winning programme, and continued with Bridge’s pupil Benjamin Britten, a gentle Italian Sonnet of Michelangelo followed by the more rumbustious John Donne setting Batter My Heart.

Another intriguing sequence followed, moving from Rebecca Clarke’s appropriation of a Scots folk melody for her own instrument, the viola, in I’ll Bid My Heart Be Still, through a  heart-stopping unaccompanied Ae Fond Kiss, to a folk melody sourced from the pianist’s Armenian heritage. McKinney added wordless melody lines to all three, more evocative of a string instrument than simple humming, and singularly effective.

It was only in the first of a pair of Richard Strauss songs that ended the programme that McKinney came briefly unstuck, losing his grasp of a top note, but he recovered quickly to deliver the closing Zueignung (Dedication) which cleverly echoed Schumann’s earlier Widmung.

Keith Bruce

Portrait of Matthew McKinney by Ben Durrant