Eleanor Meynell and Matthew Schellhorn met when they were both pupils at Chetham’s School of Music in Manchester, and their recent collaborations are marked by a shared passion in contemporary music.
After singing with the BBC Singers for five years, Eleanor Meynell now has a busy and varied solo career. Appearing regularly on BBC Radio 3, she has sung at many major UK concert venues and festivals, including the BBC Proms, and also in concert halls and opera houses across Europe and the USA. Eleanor sings with many of the UK’s opera companies and has sung roles at Grange Park Opera, Pavilion Opera and Cameo Opera. She also sings with the Monteverdi Choir and has recently returned from a residency at the Opéra Comique, Paris and the Grand Theatre in Luxembourg. She has been described in the press as ‘excellent’ (The Guardian), ‘achingly beautiful’ (Independent), and a ‘soprano of brilliance’ (Manchester Evening News).
During the 2012/13 season they present two original programmes, each commemorating towering figures of the last century.
Love and Immortality
Messiaen memorial song recital
Marking the twentieth anniversary of the death of Olivier Messiaen, soprano Eleanor Meynell and pianist Matthew Schellhorn perform his monumental song cycle Poèmes pour Mi alongside other vocal works by the composer’s own childhood inspirations.
This attractive evening song recital explores the vibrancy and rapture of European romantic poetry, setting in context Messiaen’s rich and highly personal sound world with exquisite and refined settings by Debussy, Bartók and Wagner. Messiaen’s highly personal and moving love songs, mostly performed in their later orchestral arrangement, are heard here in their original form.
Suggested pre-concert talk: Matthew Schellhorn gives an insight into his experiences of studying with Messiaen’s wife in Paris.
Programme
Claude Debussy (1862–1918)
Apparition, L 53 (1884) [4.00]
Trois Poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé, L127 (1913) [8.30]
Béla Bartók (1881–1945)
From Five Songs, BB71 (1916):
1. Tavasz: Az en szerelmem (Spring: My love) [2.00]
2. Nyar: Szomjasan vagyva (Summer: Lying and Longing) [3.00]
From 20 Hungarian Folksongs, BB 98, Vol. 3: Vegyes dalok (Diverse Songs) (1929):
11. Parosito 1 (Mating 1) [2.00]
12. Parosito 2 (Mating 2) [1.30]
Richard Wagner (1813–1883)
Wesendonck Lieder (1857–58) [19.00]
interval
Olivier Messiaen (1908–92)
Trois melodies [6.00]
Poèmes pour Mi (1936) [30.00]
As I Walked Out One Evening
A tribute to the poetry of W. H. Auden through song
W. H. Auden’s extraordinarily varied poetry is celebrated by soprano Eleanor Meynell and pianist Matthew Schellhorn in this unusual and hugely diverse song recital combining rarely performed contemporary settings with well known settings by Auden’s collaborator and friend, Benjamin Britten.
Auden’s poetry explores the Zeitgeist, times of political unrest but also of great technological and industrial advances. Rejecting the grand style and the romanticism of the past, he preferred instead a detached and unemotional style. Auden drew inspiration from a vast range of subjects ranging from love to politics, from manufacturing to eroticism. His writings include private and public poems in both conventional and popular forms, opera libretti with stirring rhythms, catchy rhymes, and pastiches of folksong and nonsense rhymes.
This eclectic and stimulating song recital is an exploration of all these different styles. The programme surveys Britten’s relationship with Auden’s poetry, and also presents five contemporary settings specially commissioned works for Auden’s centenary year, premiered at the York Late Music Festival and National Portrait Gallery in 2007.
Programme
Benjamin Britten (1913–1976)
‘Let the florid music praise’ from On this island, op. 11 (1937) [4.00]
Fish in the unruffled lakes (1937–1938) [13.00]
Elizabeth Maconchy (1907–1994)
In memory of W. B. Yeats No. 1 (1985) [4.30]
Nicola LeFanu (b. 1947)
Lay your sleeping head my love (2006) [5.30]
Elisabeth Lutyens (1906–1983)
As I walked out one evening (1942) [4.00]
Benjamin Britten
‘Tiny’s Aria’ from Paul Bunyan (1941) [4.45]
interval
Matthew Taylor (b. 1964)
Epitaph on a tyrant (2007) [4.00]
Benjamin Wallfisch (b. 1979)
Epitaph on a tyrant (2007) [2.00]
Robert Keeley (b. 1960)
Lady weeping at the crossroads (2006) [6.00]
Adam Gorb (b. 1958)
Miss Gee (2007) [9.30]
Benjamin Britten
Cabaret songs (1937–9) [15.00]
