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Leah Broad, of Christ Church, Oxford, is giving a talk about “expressions of sexual desire in Rebecca Clarke’s fabulous song The Seal Man” at this year’s conference of the Royal Musical Association, which is being held entirely online, and will be open to the general public at no charge. We cannot recommend this event more highly.

Dr. Broad stands at the forefront of a new generation of scholars who are looking at Clarke with fresh eyes and, more to the point, with scrupulous regard for the documents in the case. For The Seal Man, those documents comprise Clarke’s diaries, expository writings, and visual archive, and the complete underlying text by John Masefield, including the parts that Clarke dealt with only by implication. Perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of Dr. Broad’s presentation is her focus on Clarke’s theatrical bent, and the physicality—here, the extreme physicality—of Clarke’s vocal expression. (We’ve seen a draft of the paper, and, trust us, there is no holding back.)

The talk leads off Session 2c, scheduled for Tuesday, September 8, 2020, from 1:00 p.m. to 2:30 p.m. British Summer Time (check here for your local equivalent). The program booklet is here, and the registration form is here. Anyone may register, but you must do so in advance.

If you want to refresh your memory of one of Clarke’s great signature pieces, this is a good place to start. Masefield’s original story is here.

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Just in time for Clarke’s 134th birthday comes a truly fine account of her Sonata by our friends Mei-Chun Chen and Hsin-I Huang, whose performance of three of Clarke’s songs, in Chen’s transcriptions, we told you about the other day. Everything about their take on the Sonata is special, from the passionate urgency of the opening gesture…

…to the hint of burnished steel in the scherzo…

…to the grave, almost reverent, solemnity of the slow movement, and the extreme tension driving the transition to the finale, which makes you wonder if Clarke didn’t have the comparable moment in Beethoven’s Fifth at least faintly in mind:

The other thing that cries out for comment is the platform-manner on view here. Clarke was an accomplished stage-animal—she stood nearly six feet tall in her prime and, as one observer noted, “she strode onstage like a goddess”—so I think she would have appreciated the exquisite purposive control that lies behind every gesture in this performance. The bowed head at the beginning of the slow movement is eloquent. Even the page-turns are expressive.

Wherever Clarke is, we hope she’s smiling. Happy birthday, pal.

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Much of a 2019 recital commemorating the fortieth anniversary of Clarke’s death popped up on YouTube the other day, and it’s just as revelatory as it is improbable. A production of National Taiwan University’s Center for the Arts, the recital presented violist Mei-Chun Chen and pianist Hsin-I Huang in Chen’s transcriptions of three of Clarke’s most powerful and characteristic songs, along with deeply insightful performances of Morpheus and the Sonata. (More about the latter in a forthcoming post.)

Sir Charles Stanford, Clarke’s composition-teacher, steered students away from songs until they had acquired firm command of instrumental writing, lest they rely too heavily on “the crutches of suggestive poetry” and fail to learn that song-writing “demands a power, which is perhaps the hardest of all to acquire, of suggesting large and comprehensive ideas in a confined and economical space.” Something similar can happen on the receiving end: hearing flawless songs in fine performances can be so transporting that we miss the “large and comprehensive ideas” that give them their strength and energy. And this is where Chen’s transcriptions are so revealing.

Stripped of words and presented as “absolute music,” Clarke’s Tiger, Tiger reveals an elegance of form and logic every bit as relentless as the eponymous beast itself, and for that reason it becomes even more terrifying:

[Beginning at 2:07] Tiger, tiger, burning bright / In the forest of the night: / What immortal hand or eye / Could frame thy fearful symmetry? ¶ In what distant deeps or skies / Burnt the fire of thine eyes? / On what wings dare he aspire? / What the hand dare seize the fire? ¶ And what shoulder and what art, / Could twist the sinews of thy heart? / And when thy heart began to beat, / What dread hand? & what dread feet? ¶ What the hammer? what the chain, / In what furnace was thy brain? / What the anvil? what dread grasp, / Dare its deadly terrors clasp! ¶ When the stars threw down their spears / And water’d heaven with their tears: / Did he smile his work to see? / Did he who made the Lamb make thee? ¶ Tiger Tiger burning bright, / In the forests of the night: / What immortal hand or eye, / Dare frame thy fearful symmetry? (William Blake)

By contrast, The Cherry-Blossom Wand, with its feather-light text, can seem like a charming bauble that goes by in a flash. Without the words, however, its underlying sobriety instantly comes to the fore, and it begins to feel like a very large idea indeed:

I will pluck from my tree a cherry-blossom wand, / And carry it in my merciless hand, / So I will drive you, so bewitch your eyes, / With a beautiful thing that can never grow wise. ¶ Light are the petals that fall from the bough, / And lighter the love that I offer you now; / In a spring day shall the tale be told / Of the beautiful things that will never grow old. ¶ The blossoms shall fall in the night wind,/ And I will leave you so, to be kind: / Eternal in beauty, are short-lived flowers, /Eternal in beauty, these exquisite hours. ¶ I will pluck from my tree a cherry-blossom wand, / And carry it in my merciless hand, / So I will drive you, so bewitch your eyes, / With a beautiful thing that shall never grow wise. (Anna Wickham)

But it’s The Donkey—one of Clarke’s most nakedly theatrical songs—that really drives the point home:

When fishes flew and forests walked / And figs grew upon thorn, / Some moment when the moon was blood / Then surely I was born. ¶ With monstrous head and sickening cry / And ears like errant wings, / The devil’s walking parody / On all four-footed things. ¶ The tattered outlaw of the earth, / Of ancient crooked will; / Starve, scourge, deride me: I am dumb, / I keep my secret still. ¶ Fools! For I also had my hour; / One far fierce hour and sweet: / There was a shout about my ears, / And palms before my feet. (G.K. Chesterton)

With the declamatory vocal line transferred to the viola, it is instantly apparent that the “shout” that ushers Jesus into Jerusalem is nothing less than the opening salvo of the Sonata, note for note, at pitch. So much for the claim that Clarke tried to hide her light under a bushel, or the corollary notion that her songs were lesser things, devoid of intellectual content, meant only for the parlor and her circle of friends!

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On BBC Radio 3’s Record Review next weekend, host Andrew McGregor and Natasha Loges, Head of Postgraduate Programmes and Reader in Musicology at the Royal College of Music, will name five indispensable recordings by Rebecca Clarke, Lili Boulanger, Caterina Assandra, Fanny Mendelssohn, and a mystery-composer yet to be announced, and explain why you need to hear them. The program airs on Saturday, August 15, 2020, at 9:00 a.m. British Summer Time, and becomes available for streaming around noontime that same day (check here for your local equivalents).

We won’t know the repertoire until then, apart from the fact that Clarke will be represented by the Trio—plenty of rich possibilities there! Clarke, Mendelssohn, and Boulanger need no introduction, of course, but if Assandra’s name is the least bit unfamiliar to you, you ought to seize this opportunity to experience her exquisite concertato-style motets.

The program will be available for streaming-on-demand through Friday, September 18. Enjoy!

[Update: The mystery-composer turned out to be Minna Keal, and the indispensable recording of Clarke’s Trio was Chandos’s 2019 release by the Neave Trio. The other parts of the program were fascinating, too, in part because George Crumb’s delicious take on Chagall’s “The Painter,” from Metamorphoses (Book I): Ten Fantasy Pieces (after celebrated paintings) for amplified piano, composed just the other day, suggests that the world may finally have caught up with Rebecca Clarke’s extraordinary piano-writing. The section about Clarke begins at 1:06:30.]

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Princes Street Gardens Attractions | Edinburgh Tourist

The Edinburgh International Festival—like everything else this year, largely shuttered due to COVID-19—offers a brilliant workaround: a series of specially-filmed recitals by leading soloists and chamber ensembles from around the world, beamed out from The Hub on Castlehill on the Festival’s YouTube channel, with new performances every Monday to Friday from August 10 through August 28, at 1:00 p.m. British Summer Time (check here for your local equivalent).

Clarke was a frequent musical visitor to Edinburgh, and a welcome one at that. On this pass, her Prelude, Allegro, and Pastorale, for clarinet and viola, figures as the centerpiece of a program that also includes Glazunov’s Reverie Orientale and Weber’s Clarinet Quintet. Glazunov was a somewhat improbable enthusiasm of Clarke’s composition teacher, Sir Charles Stanford, so here’s a rare opportunity to hear the two of them side by side. The concert, by members of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, begins streaming on August 14.

The series as a whole looks terrific, with appearances by Angela Hewitt, Malcolm Martineau, Mark Padmore, Paul Lewis, and other notables, and a substantial array of works by women, including Nadia Boulanger, Sally Beamish, Judith Weir, Anna Meredith, Isabella Leonarda, Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre, Pauline Viardot, and Clara Schumann. Padmore and Lewis’s recital, on August 26, pairs songs by Schumann with a little something called Dichterliebe, which seems to have been written by somebody with whom she shares a surname—husband? brother? cousin? Whatever.

A comprehensive schedule and roster are here.

[Update: The concert was absolutely glorious, including the finest performance of Prelude, Allegro, and Pastorale that you are ever likely to hear. The complete program is here and here.]

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Europe is putting on a de-facto Rebecca Clarke Festival, starting in August 2020 and extending well into 2021—and much of it focuses on some of the less-familiar items in the Clarke repertoire, or presents fixtures in new guises. Here are a few upcoming items of exceptional interest:

Streaming August 7, 2020, at 18:00 Central European Summer Time (check here for your local equivalent): A rare performance of Clarke’s Sonata in her own alternative version for cello, along with Ravel’s Kaddisch, Fauré’s Élégie, and the Debussy cello sonata, in a free online recital by Francesco Dillon and Gioia Giusti, from this year’s Musica sulle Apuane festival—an event that should be as moving as it is spectacular. The festival takes place in one of the most staggering physical sites in the world—the Apuan Alps, a UNESCO Global Geopark in northwestern Tuscany—and this particular program will be given in the open air, at the hilltop Sacrario di Sant’Anna di Stazzema, where the victims of one of the most horrific civilian massacres of World War II are memorialized. The Ravel and Fauré pieces—and perhaps the slow-movement of the Clarke—acknowledge the massacre’s anniversary, which falls later in the week.

August 13: The Katrina Chamber Music Festival, which boasts another spectacular location—the Åland Islands, midway between Stockholm and Helsinki—celebrates various Twenties with a fascinating program featuring Clarke’s Trio (1921), alongside songs by Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel (1820s), a Greek melody by Gurdzjeff, Pedro Laurenz’s Berreti (arranged by Astor Piazzola), and Amy Beach’s String Quartet Op. 89 (all 1920s), and Terry Riley’s Tango Ladeado (2020). The players in the Clarke are Cecilia Zilliacus, Kati Raitinen, and Anna Laakso.

August 18: Piano Salon Christophori, the coolest concert-venue in Berlin, presents an all-Clarke recital by Anna Krzyżak (viola), Ignacy Siarkowski (clarinet), and Aleksandra Czerniecka (piano), including the Sonata, I’ll Bid My Heart Be Still, and Prelude, Allegro, and Pastorale in their original instrumentations, along with Dumka and the viola Lullaby in Siarkowski’s arrangements with clarinet. Clarke was a copious self-arranger, so my guess is that she would have been quite pleased by all this, especially if it allowed her to assess Dumka‘s klezmer-worthiness. (And don’t take my word for the awesome coolness of the venue—check out this and this and this.)

August 25: Spain’s venerable Festival Internacional de Santander presents the Ensemble Instrumental de Cantabria (ENSEIC) in a tantalizing program called “Espuma de luz y sombra (Del dolor y la esperanza),” in which the opening movement of Clarke’s Prelude, Allegro, and Pastorale, for clarinet and viola, falls somewhere between pain and hope, along with works by Purcell, Turina, Britten, Sanz Vélez, Shostakovich, Anónimo (s. XVI), Villa-Lobos, Vásquez, Falla, and Elgar (arr. Turina). “Espuma” means froth, or foam, and you might be deeply puzzled by what a “foam of light and shadow” might sound like, unless you’re a high-test food-maven and catch the reference to one of the great Catalonian chef Ferran Adrià’s most distinctive inventions—an almost weightless combination of flavored custard and whipped cream meant to “provoke, surprise, and delight the diner.” Should be quite an evening.

September 4: Nimrod Guez and Bernd Glemser place Clarke’s Sonata in broad historical context during this year’s Chamber Music Week at the Evangelisches Seminar Maulbronn, in Baden-Württemberg, Germany, where the likes of Kepler, Hölderlin, Mörike, and Hesse have been going to school since 1556, and where Glemser is Artist in Residence. Maulbronn Kammermusikwoche is one of those world-class events that wears its eminence lightly—exactly the kind of thing Clarke rejoiced in—so she might have been doubly pleased to figure with Bach, Brahms, and Shostakovich in the festival’s first-ever viola program.

September 12: Denmark’s Aarhuskammermusikfestival offers an evening of “English Impressionists,” featuring Clarke’s June Twilight and The Cloths of Heaven, sung by mezzo-soprano Kirsten Voss Petersen, and the Sonata, played by Daniel Eklund, all with Oscar Micaelsson as pianist. The program also includes Bridge’s cello sonata and songs with viola and piano, and Bax’s Elegiac Trio. The performers—all recent graduates of the Royal Danish Academy, Copenhagen—are exactly the kind of young professionals Clarke delighted in and fostered. With advocates like these, surely, her future is in good hands.

More coming. Stay tuned.