Through the Centuries: Review of Madeleine Dring’s Song Album – dismisses any notion that she was not a serious composer | classical music

forMadeleine Dring was born in 1923 and studied at the Royal College of Music, where her teachers included Herbert Howells and Vaughan Williams. An unconventional career, including stints in theatre, pantomime and cabaret, ended with her death of a brain aneurysm at the age of 53. Already a maverick, the fact that much of her music remained unreleased until the late 1990s threatened to condemn her to obscurity.

Enter Kitty Whately and Julius Drake, who extensively surveyed any notion that Dring was not a serious composer. Drawing on poets from Shakespeare and his fellow Elizabethans to the composer’s contemporaries, Dring’s deft talent for word definition proves as effective as her ability to find a distinctive new melody for such old chestnuts as “He Was a Lover and His Mistress.”

Whately’s warm, supple mezzo-soprano takes these often impassioned outpourings in its stride while spotless diction and intense engagement with the text draws the listener into a heady world of rediscovered mini-dramas. Drake knows when to give the piano his head and when to offer more self-effacing support.

There is a lot of variety here. “Love is a Disease” pulses with unfinished emotion, as does “Echoes” with its cheerful blue lines. By contrast, a great deal of fun is had through satirical “encouragements to a lover,” as in Shakespeare’s The Cuckoo. As an encore, Dring’s arrangement of Cole Porter’s “In the Still of the Night” is as welcome and tart as olives in a dry martini.