Leeds Song Festival review – from haiku to hauntings in the evening that think outside the box | classical music

toThe Eeds’ high-profile celebration of the vocal arts continues to push the envelope. Two vastly different concerts were exemplary of director Joseph Middleton’s determination to think outside the box while honoring the festival’s roots in traditional concert.

Haiku, which premiered last year in Minnesota, emerged from the fertile minds of baritone Roderick Williams and pianist Ian Burnside. The program, which lasts about 90 minutes, revolves around eight poems taken from a collection of haiku poems written by Japanese Americans who were interned during World War II. Libby Larsen’s settings – sung in English and Japanese and collectively titled Mobile/Not Mobile/… – are distilled musical morsels, brimming with imagination, exploring themes of exile, detention and deportation.

Interwoven with these lively miniatures are a variety of complementary songs drawn from Williams’ extensive repertoire. Internal echoes and modern echoes made their way through a finely balanced recitation that proved both stimulating and entertaining at the same time.

The sheer sweep of the program – from Schubert and Liszt to Britten and Poulenc – may have taxed a lesser human being, but not the master storyteller Williams, who, if you’ll pardon the cliché, can bring a telephone book to life. His warm vocal embrace and expressive body brought pain, compassion, intelligence and wisdom to a variety of songs. Burnside was his equal, a generous and supportive pianist who instinctively knew how to cast a musical aura around a sound.

Among the many highlights were Gerald Finzi’s setting of Thomas Hardy’s Waiting for Both, in which the man exchanges laconic depths with a knowing star; Then there were delicious discoveries, including Joan Trimble’s My Grief on the Sea, a tender Irish love song, and Elizabeth Lutyens’s satirical setting of WH Auden’s Refugee Blues. Elsewhere, Williams brought rapturous energy to Larsen’s paean about white-toothed children chasing dragonflies, before capturing the misty laziness of Vaughan Williams’ “Silent Noon.” Maria Grever’s rumba-infused “What a Difference a Day” was the perfect relaxing note to end on.

If haiku remained within the confines of a traditional ceremony, the Dunwich Festival Committee expanded the idea to its extreme. Described as a ‘song cycle without a singer’, it was created by Leeds-based composer Martin Eddon in collaboration with pianist Rei Nakamura, speaker Gillian Jane Lees and videographer Adam Yorke Gregory.

This piece bears the name of the famous “Lost City” of East Anglia, a seaport that was thriving in the Middle Ages, but was gradually swallowed up by the North Sea. The haunting soundscape combines field recordings made at the site of Dunwich’s final tombstone with Idon’s shape-shifting writing for piano, a score that hovers on the edge of traditional tones, whispering bells, folk song, hymn and the sea.

Over these aural quicksands, Lees delivers slyly sinister accounts of local ghost stories, tales of jilted maidens, bells ringing beneath the waves, and Blackshock, a demonic hound that haunts the coast of East Anglia. Gregory’s eerie black-and-white videos of Dunwich and its environs showed forbidden seas and traces of speeding figures fluttering anxiously like mysterious wisps. Exciting fare.