On Monday, day three of Rye Arts Festival, three compelling performers, Philip Franks, Iain Burnside and Roderick Williams brought a too-little-known poet and composer back to life in Burnside’s portrait of First World War survivor Ivor Gurney: First War Poet of England Am I.
This compilation is a masterpiece of concision, which enlightened us all about Gurney’s highly individual personality, his poetry and music and his historical and artistic context; though living on until 1937, he had his already troubled life shattered by the so-called Great War.
Philip Franks became Gurney as he vividly and dramatically presented the poems and also a lengthy extract from the letter from which the event’s title is drawn. Pianist and compiler Iain Burnside’s sensitive playing of two of Gurney’s preludes gave time for reflection and his accompaniment of the magnificent Roderick Williams’s singing of Gurney’s songs and a number by other appropriate composers, was equally impressive.
Williams is a most wonderful artist, combining tremendous power with the utmost tenderness unencumbered by music or texts, as he sang everything entirely from memory. It was a masterstroke of Burnside’s to include German lieder by Schubert and Schumann to remind us of two of the main combatants in World War One and of the healing power of music.
Though by no means essential, it would have been useful to have translations of the lieder to look at later. With no interval to break the spell, the beautifully elegiac Finzi setting of Shakespeare’s Fear No More the Heat o’ the Sun from Cymbeline concluded in a most moving way a most memorable evening.
Beforehand, I knew hardly anything about Ivor Gurney; afterwards, I felt that, in an indefinable way, I had actually known him.
Image Credits: Rye Arts Festival .