Alec Roth (b. 1948)
A Road Less Travelled
The Garden Path
Other Earths and Skies
Mark Padmore, Hugo Hymas (tenor); Martha McClorinan (mezzo-soprano)
Morgan Szymanski (guitar); Nicholas Daniel (oboe)
Sacconi Quartet
rec. 2022, St. Anne and St. Agnes Church, City of London
Sung texts provided
Signum Classics SIGCD971 [61]
This is my third MusicWeb review of music by Alec Roth. If I was highly enthusiastic about a disc of string quartets, I was positively ecstatic about his cantata, A Time to Dance – review. Roth is a composer who works within an resolutely tonal idiom. You may breathe a sigh of relief at this, or alternatively question its validity in the 21st century. Both reactions are valid. For what it’s worth, writing about the string quartet disc – review – I had this to say: ‘a composer with as rich an aural imagination as Roth’s does not need to employ an extensive musical vocabulary’. To complete this, however, must be added the remarkable beauty and individuality of voice to be found in Roth’s work.
Other Earths and Skies is presented as ‘Five miniatures after Li Bai for tenor and oboe’. The composer writes that that the idea of the work took root when he heard Mark Padmore in a performance of Vaughan Williams’s Ten Blake Songs, written for the same forces. It was first performed in 2010, and this is a revised version, though the composer gives us tantalisingly little information as to the extent and nature of the revision. The five short lyrics – four lines each – are by Li Bai (701-762) and translated from the Chinese by Vikram Seth, whose original work Roth has also frequently set to music. Roth’s booklet essay succinctly introduces the subjects of the five lyrics: ‘homesickness; young apes playing in the moonlight; the consolations of solitude; a spectacular waterfall; parting from an old friend’. Whilst Roth responds readily to some of the pictorial elements in these words – the apes play with great gusto, for instance – the overall atmosphere is both intangible and rather melancholy. The voice and the oboe are equal partners, the oboe frequently giving out a melody before the voice delivers the opening words, sometimes with contributions from the oboe, but as often as not unaccompanied. With only four lines of text to set many composers would resort to repetition, but Roth, instead, makes much use of wordless singing. The song about the apes, for instance, features a lively motto theme as the animals play, with a coda in which the voice accompanies the oboe with a vocalise. Only at the end of the fourth song, and then briefly, can the two strands, voice and oboe, be said to come together in any conventional sense, in an attractive piece of counterpoint. In the fifth song, once the four lines have been sung, the oboe spins a flowing line over which the tenor wordlessly intones a melody expressing the poet’s feeling at the departure of his friend. Roth might have stopped there, but instead he has the performers change places. It is a simple idea, even an obvious one, but very moving in its effect.
I had not encountered Hugo Hymas before, and no praise is too high for his performance here. The voice is beautiful, the singing expressive, and every word is clear. In Nicholas Daniel, familiar to us all, he has the perfect collaborator. Alec Roth is fortunate indeed to be able to count on musicians of this stature.
The Garden Path is a set of four short songs on texts by the American poet Amy Lowell (1874-1925). The second song deals with the wind ‘singing through the trees’ with phrases such as ‘this wild, tumultuous joy’ and ‘The freedom of the onward sweeping wind’. Whilst the accompanying string quartet treats us to appropriately rushing, moto perpetuo figures, the vocal line is curiously restrained, even understated. But Roth does not disappoint: the rushing of the wind is in evidence in a wordless coda. In ‘Withered Leaves’ the sadness of one ‘left behind’ is skilfully evoked, first in the constant, gently moving accompaniment, then by judicious repetition of certain words and phrases, and finally, with more wordless singing, in this case a single note at the end of the song. In the final song, ‘Late September’, the poet takes us for a stroll in the garden. The quartet’s bucolic accompaniment gently dances, and she herself, though pensive, is light of heart, as witness the hummed asides into which Martha McClorinan injects real meaning, as she does throughout the work.
The Garden Path, originally written for voice and piano, was ‘substantially re-written’ into the version with string quartet recorded here. The quartet writing is attractive and restrained, and beautifully delivered by the Sacconi Quartet. The longest work on the programme, A Road Less Travelled, is curiously billed as a ‘Solo cantata for tenor with guitar and/or string quartet’. And/or? This performance brings us only Morgan Szymanski alongside Mark Padmore, even though the work was first performed by those same artists plus the Sacconi Quartet. It’s all very curious.
A Road Less Travelled is made up of 15 songs to words by Edward Thomas, he who immortalised the railway station at Adlestrop in a poem many of us studied at school and haven’t forgotten in the years that have passed since then. Thomas was a married man with three children and substantial literary work already behind him when he decided to enlist for service in the First World War. He was killed in action near Arras shortly after his arrival in France.
There are too many points of interest in this work to even begin to do it justice. To choose just a couple, I’ll begin with the lines ‘I’m bound away for ever,/Away somewhere, away for ever’ in the second song. This is a kind of refrain set to a tune that, heard in the morning, is still in your head when you turn out the lights at the end of the day. Then Roth sets Thomas’s poem ‘Roads’ in two parts, first inserting myriad tiny details so subtly that you hardly notice them, underlining the idea that, for the traveller, roads go on, and are endless. A reference in the second part, however, to France, to where ‘all roads lead’, brings a rare example of overt illustration of individual words or ideas in the text. This, I think, is the heart of the work.
The cantata runs for over half an hour, much of it slow and quiet. In the more pensive songs the voice is supported by only a skeletal accompaniment, and for many passages, by none at all. Even the final song, ‘Lights Out’, follows this pattern, despite the rich guitar chords with which it begins. Given just how restrained a role is given to the guitar, I am intrigued to know what the quartet would have played. Roth attaches great importance to the text, and there is a lot of it here. Time devoted to studying it will certainly enhance a listener’s appreciation of this beautiful if rather sombre work, but once listening you can hear every word in Mark Padmore’s performance. Demonstrative declamation is not required, and Padmore displays an admirable variety of tone and colour within what is, and must be, a restrained delivery. Nor does the work demand overt virtuosity from the guitarist, and within that framework Morgan Szymanski provided playing of extreme sensitivity.
William Hedley
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