20 JANUARY 2007, Page 36

A two-way deal

Henrietta Bredin on how Roger Quilter inspired a baritone and a composer The phrase 'English song' is often met with suspicion, bringing with it a whiff of the morris dance, the come, follow follow and the hey nonny no — and the work of Roger Quilter, composing in the first half of the 20th century, is no exception to this reaction. However, for those with ears to hear and prejudices to shed, there are rare treasures to be found when a new recording of his complete songs for solo voice and piano is released at the end of February, sung by baritone Mark Stone, accompanied by the composer and conductor Stephen Barlow.

'Quilter and I go back a long way,' says Stone. 'Three of his Shakespeare songs were some of the first things I ever learnt. I was a late starter as a singer, and when I went to music college it appeared to me that everyone knew considerably more about everything than I did; so I thought, "Right, nobody else seems to be interested in Roger Quilter. He can only have written about 20 songs, so I'll just find the rest and learn them and then I'll be an expert in something." But because I was a typical feckless student, I didn't actually get round to focusing on them until years later when I found a book by Trevor Hold and discovered there were over 100 songs, which was a bit daunting. Then I read Valerie Langfield's brilliant biography and discovered that there were 142, but the notion of completeness had really stuck by then, so I consulted her and it's been a fascinating sleuthing job.'

'Mark's a particularly gifted song singer,' adds Barlow. 'He's a detailed performer and thinker and the smallscale really interests him And he's the most amazing researcher; he combed through all the recording catalogues and spotted that it's really only the same handful of songs that have been recorded over and over again.'

The idea of tackling the complete songs, rescuing some of them from obscurity, clearly appeals to both men. It has given them a perspective on the composer's work as a whole; the way in which it developed and took shape. They have not been tempted to pick individual favourites for special attention, finding repeatedly that the most unpromising or dull-seeming songs were nothing of the sort. 'On the first disc,' (there will be four altogether) says Stone, 'there's a song called "Trollie Lollie Laughter" which, frankly, I had no hopes for at all. We rehearsed it a few times and thought, "Well, that'll do, we'll slip that one in somewhere halfway through the disc and no one will notice." Then, when we got into the recording studio, Stephen was playing it through and he stopped and said, "I think Roger had just spent a bit too long in the Savoy cocktail bar when he was writing this." Suddenly it clicked. We did it straight away, and it worked brilliantly.'

Building a creative performing relationship of this intimacy is a deeply rewarding experience, and an intuitive understanding and trust grows as the work proceeds, as Barlow explains: 'Accompanying people on the piano has always been a huge delight, and I've been doing it since I was at choir school, for instrumentalists like Andrew Marriner, who's now principal clarinet with the LSO, and later for singers. When you get together with someone on a big project like this, you really begin to understand that it's a two-way deal, and as the partnership grows you begin to feel less like an accompanist and much more like a partner.' Stone agrees: 'The rehearsal is intensive, but I've noticed that we spent a long time on the first disc, the second was much quicker and the third quicker still. We have an instinct now for what the other is doing, a shared language. And of course we go through these things again and again, but when you get to the studio you have to forget all that and simply see what emerges. The listening audience shouldn't have to hear the hard graft behind the performance.'

Quilter himself was extremely interested in the potential of recording, writing an article on 'The Future of the Gramophone' for the Voice magazine in July 1920, in which he said that he thought it would be 'invaluable to young students of singing', enabling them to listen to the 'rendering of songs and arias by first-rate artists' until 'they have every shade and nuance by heart'. There are recordings 4,q of him accompanying some of his own songs but these are a mixed blessing to today's interpreters. Stone is robust about this: 'Like any performance recording, it can only ever be a snapshot. There's no such thing as the definitive version. The only guide is the music that's there on the paper and it's up to us to interpret that and reinvent it as we think best.'

Barlow has listened to, and been fascinated by, Quilter's recordings but knows he then has to move on. 'I tend not to listen to any recordings when I'm preparing something, simply because analysing a recording and analysing a piece of music on the page seem to involve different parts of the brain. When Quilter made a recording of his own music was he really interested in putting down a definitive interpretation which he wanted everybody to copy and note for posterity? If you listen, there's a great deal that he does in performance that simply isn't there on the page. For example, he marks arpeggios quite sparingly but he plays them all the time, like a harp, which is probably just the style of the period. He was a perfectionist and an extraordinary craftsman, like a watch-maker. All the piano parts are fantastically honed and sculpted, and that reflects the size of his hand and his particular technique. The vocal writing is similarly perfect; it's jewellike, organised down to the last degree. My piano-playing technique is quite different from his and it's crucial that Mark and I keep our own organic sense of how we perform his music.'

One of Quilter's great strengths as a composer is his acutely sensitive ear for text. He respects the natural stresses of poetry, and the result is music of a deceptively limpid, crystalline quality. 'When you hear a great song by Roger Quilter you get to the end of it and you think, "What a wonderful poem." You never think how clever the music is; he almost makes it invisible,' says Stone. And he chooses poems by the great English lyrical writers, Herrick and Shakespeare, Blake and Shelley; writers who, as noted by the music critic Ralph Hill in 1933, provide a counterpart to his own musical style in 'polished workmanship, delicate sentiment and graceful rhythm and imagery'.

Selecting the order in which songs are laid down on a recording is a complex art form in itself. Stone compares it to arranging the seating at a dinner party. 'You can do it in so many different ways: chronologically, by poet, grouping together all the songs that mention a rose.'

'Mark's led the way on this,' says Barlow, 'and he's done it really inventively so that each disc stands true, with its own interest and diversity. One disc will end with a flourish and another on a quieter note, with a feeling of completion.'

I look forward to all four discs and so, I imagine, would Roger Quilter.