Voyages by Mary Bevan

Various composers

Mary Bevan

Voyages

Price: € 19.95
Format: CD
Label: Signum Classics
UPC: 0635212050927
Catnr: SIGCD 509
Release date: 03 November 2017
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Label
Signum Classics

UPC
0635212050927

Catalogue number
SIGCD 509

Release date
03 November 2017

Album

Artist(s)

Composer(s)

About the album

Soprano Mary Bevan and pianist Jopseph Middleton perform a programme exploring the genius of Baudelaire and Goethe, and how texts by them unlocked very specific musical landscapes in settings by Debussy, Duparc, Chausson, de Bréville, Séverac, Fauré and Schubert.

Praised by Opera for her “dramatic wit and vocal control” in stand out performances on opera and concert platforms, Mary Bevan is a winner of the Royal Philharmonic Society’s Young Artist award and UK Critics’ Circle Award for Exceptional Young Talent in music.

Pianist Joseph Middleton specialises in the art of song accompaniment and chamber music and has been highly acclaimed within this field. Described in the BBC Music Magazine as “one of the brightest stars in the world of song and Lieder”, he has also been labeled “the cream of the new generation” by The Times and “a perfect accompanist” by Opera Now.

Gerenommeerde Britse artiesten reizen door de muzikale landschappen van Baudelaire en Goethe

Sopraan Mary Bevan en pianist Joseph Middleton voeren een programma uit dat de genialiteit van Baudelaire en Goethe verkent, en hoe hun teksten zeer specifieke muzikale landschappen ontsloten in toonzettingen van Debussy, Duparc, Chausson, de Bréville, Séverac, Fauré en Schubert. Het programma bevat een aantal werken die zelden worden opgenomen, uitgevoerd door gerenommeerde Britse artiesten.

Mary Bevan wordt door Opera geprezen om haar “dramatische scherpzinnigheid en vocale beheersing” in uitstekende uitvoeringen op opera- en concertpodia.

Pianist Joseph Middleton specialiseert zich in de kunst van het begeleiden van liederen en kamermuziek en wordt hoog gewaardeerd op dit terrein. BBC Music Magazine beschreef hem als “een van de helderste sterren in de wereld van (kunst)liederen”, en werd gelabeld als “het puikje van de nieuwe generatie” door The Times en “een perfecte begeleider” door Opera Now. Met dit album zet hij zijn hooggewaardeerde reeks programma’s voort.

Artist(s)

Mary Bevan

Mary Bevan appears with leading opera houses, orchestras and ensembles worldwide. For the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden she sang Morgana in a new Richard Jones Alcina, Lila in David Bruce The Firework-Maker’s Daughter, performed the title roles of Rossi Orpheus at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse and of Turnage Coraline at the Barbican, and made her main stage debut as Barbarina Le nozze di Figaro. For English National Opera, roles include Susanna Le nozze di Figaro, Eurydice in Offenbach Orpheus in the Underworld and Zerlina Don Giovanni. She made her debut with Opera di Roma as Cleopatra Giulio Cesare, returning as Morgana, also debuting for the Zurich Opera House (La Folie Platée) and Bayerische Staatsoper (title role La Calisto). Opera highlights elsewhere have...

Bevan’s concert performances include her Carnegie Hall debut as Dalinda Ariodante with the English Concert (Harry Bicket), Creation at the Barbican with the Academy of Ancient Music, Sally Beamish The Judas Passion with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, orchestrated Schubert songs with the CBSO (Edward Gardner) and appearances with the Handel and Haydn Society Boston, Philharmonia Baroque, BBC Symphony Orchestra, BBC Concert Orchestra, Barokksolistine, LPO and at the BBC Proms. She has toured extensively across Europe, Australia, Asia and the US with the Kammerorchester Basel, Australian Chamber Orchestra and English Concert, and she appears regularly in recital at Wigmore Hall.

Bevan’s wide-ranging discography includes numerous releases on Signum Records: a recording of orchestral French song entitled Visions Illuminées, art song albums Voyages and Divine Muse with pianist Joseph Middleton, and Handel’s Queens. Other albums include Handel's The Triumph of Time and Truth and Ode for St Cecilia’s Day, Vaughan Williams Symphony No.3 and Schubert Rosamunde with the BBC Philharmonic, Arthur Sullivan songs (Chandos), Vaughan Williams folk songs (Albion), Brahms Liebesliederwaltzer (Resonus), and more.

Bevan is a winner of the Royal Philharmonic Society’s Young Artist award and UK Critics’ Circle Award for Exceptional Young Talent in music. She was awarded an MBE in the Queen’s birthday honours list in 2019 and was made a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Music in 2025.

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Joseph Middleton (piano)

Pianist Joseph Middleton specializes in the art of song accompaniment and chamber music and has been highly acclaimed in this field. Described in Opera Magazine as ‘the rightful heir to legendary accompanist Gerald Moore’, by BBC Music Magazine as ‘one of the brightest stars in the world of song and Lieder’, he has also been labeled ‘the cream of the new generation’ by The Times. He is Director of Leeds Lieder, Musician in Residence and a Bye Fellow at Pembroke College, Cambridge and a Fellow of his alma mater, the Royal Academy of Music, where he is also a Professor. He was the first accompanist to win the Royal Philharmonic Society’s Young Artist Award.
Joseph is a frequent guest at major music centres including London’s Wigmore Hall (where he has been a featured artist), Royal Opera House and Royal Festival Hall, New York’s Alice Tully Hall and Park Avenue Armory, Het Concertgebouw Amsterdam, Konzerthaus and Musikverein Vienna, Zürich Tonhalle, Hamburg Elbphilharmonie, Berlin BoulezSaal, Kölner Philharmonie, Strasbourg, Frankfurt, Lille and Gothenburg Opera Houses, Baden- Baden, Philharmonie Luxembourg, Musée d’Orsay Paris, Oji Hall Tokyo and Festivals in Aix-en-Provence, Aldeburgh, Barcelona, Schloss Elmau, Edinburgh, Munich, Ravinia, San Francisco, Schubertiade Hohenems and Schwarzenberg, deSingel, Soeul, Stuttgart, Toronto and Vancouver.
He made his BBC Proms debut in 2016 alongside Iestyn Davies and Carolyn Sampson and returned in 2018 alongside Dame Sarah Connolly where they premiered recently discovered songs by Benjamin Britten.
Joseph enjoys recitals with internationally established singers including Sir Thomas Allen, Louise Alder, Mary Bevan, Ian Bostridge, Allan Clayton, Dame Sarah Connolly, Marianne Crebassa, Iestyn Davies, Fatma Said, Samuel Hasselhorn, Christiane Karg, Katarina Karnéus, Angelika Kirchschlager, Dame Felicity Lott, Christopher Maltman, John Mark Ainsley, Ann Murray DBE, James Newby, Mark Padmore, Mauro Peter, Miah Persson, Sophie Rennert, Ashley Riches, Dorothea Röschmann, Kate Royal, Carolyn Sampson, Nicky Spence and Roderick Williams.
He has a special relationship with BBC Radio 3, frequently curating his own series and performing alongside the BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artists. His critically acclaimed and fast-growing discography has seen him awarded a Diapason D’or, Edison Award and Priz Caecilia as well as receiving numerous nominations for Gramophone, BBC Music Magazines and International Classical Music Awards. His interest in the furthering of the song repertoire has led Gramophone Magazine to describe him as ‘the absolute king of programming’.

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Composer(s)

Franz Schubert

Franz Peter Schubert was an Austrian composer. Schubert already died before his 32nd birthday, but was extremely prolific during his lifetime. His output consists of over six hundred secular vocal works (mainly Lieder), seven complete symphonies, sacred music, operas, incidental music and a large body of chamber and piano music. Appreciation of his music while he was alive was limited to a relatively small circle of admirers in Vienna, but interest in his work increased significantly in the decades following his death. Felix Mendelssohn, Robert Schumann, Franz Liszt, Johannes Brahms and other 19th-century composers discovered and championed his works. Today, Schubert is ranked among the greatest composers of the late Classical and early Romantic eras and is one of the most frequently performed composers of the early nineteenth century.
It was in the genre of the Lied that Schubert made his most indelible mark. Prior to Schubert's influence, Lieder tended toward a strophic, syllabic treatment of text, evoking the folksong qualities engendered by the stirrings of Romantic nationalism. Schubert expanded the potentialities of the genre like no other composer before.

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Claude Debussy

Claude Debussy was a French composer. He and Maurice Ravel were the most prominent figures associated with impressionist music, though Debussy disliked the term when applied to his compositions. He was made Chevalier of the Legion of Honour in 1903. He was among the most influential composers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and his use of non-traditional scales and chromaticism influenced many composers who followed. Debussy's music is noted for its sensory content and frequent usage of non-traditional tonalities. The prominent French literary style of his period was known as Symbolism, and this movement directly inspired Debussy both as a composer and as an active cultural participant Among his most famous works are his Clair de Lune, his Three Nocturnes...

Claude Debussy was a French composer. He and Maurice Ravel were the most prominent figures associated with impressionist music, though Debussy disliked the term when applied to his compositions. He was made Chevalier of the Legion of Honour in 1903. He was among the most influential composers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and his use of non-traditional scales and chromaticism influenced many composers who followed.
Debussy's music is noted for its sensory content and frequent usage of non-traditional tonalities. The prominent French literary style of his period was known as Symbolism, and this movement directly inspired Debussy both as a composer and as an active cultural participant Among his most famous works are his Clair de Lune, his Three Nocturnes and his orchestral piece La Mer.

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Henri Duparc

Henri Duparc is perhaps one of the most efficient composers of music history: with just a handful of works he made himself famous. After all, Duparc was an extraordinary perfectionist; he could work on a single song for years. That was his specialty too: songs, for solo voice and piano accompaniment. In 16 years, Duparc composed 13 songs to his satisfaction, after which he quit composing in 1885, at the age of 37. He settled down in a calm family life and spent his time reading and painting watercolours. This step was partly due to a growing hypersensitivity. The extreme sensitiveness, the perfectionism and the refined artistic taste can all be heard in his songs: these are unique for their...

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Pierre de Bréville

Emmanuel Chabrier

Source: WikiPedia Alexis-Emmanuel Chabrier (French: [ɛmanɥɛl ʃabʁie]; 18 January 1841 – 13 September 1894) was a Romantic composer and pianist, born in Ambert, central France. His bourgeois family did not approve of a musical career for him, and he studied law in Paris and then worked as a civil servant until the age of thirty-nine while immersing himself in the modernist artistic life of the French capital and composing in his spare time. From 1880 until his final illness he was a full-time composer. Although known primarily for two of his orchestral works, España and Joyeuse marche, Chabrier left a corpus of operas (including L'étoile), songs, and piano music, but no symphonies, concertos, quartets, sonatas, or religious or liturgical music. His lack of academic training left him free to create his own musical language,...

Source: WikiPedia Alexis-Emmanuel Chabrier (French: [ɛmanɥɛl ʃabʁie]; 18 January 1841 – 13 September 1894) was a Romantic composer and pianist, born in Ambert, central France. His bourgeois family did not approve of a musical career for him, and he studied law in Paris and then worked as a civil servant until the age of thirty-nine while immersing himself in the modernist artistic life of the French capital and composing in his spare time. From 1880 until his final illness he was a full-time composer.

Although known primarily for two of his orchestral works, España and Joyeuse marche, Chabrier left a corpus of operas (including L'étoile), songs, and piano music, but no symphonies, concertos, quartets, sonatas, or religious or liturgical music. His lack of academic training left him free to create his own musical language, unaffected by established rules, and he was regarded by many later composers as an important innovator and a catalyst who paved the way for French modernism. He was admired by, and influenced, composers as diverse as Debussy, Ravel, Richard Strauss, Satie, Stravinsky, and the group of composers known as Les six. Writing at a time when French musicians were generally proponents or opponents of the music of Wagner, Chabrier steered a middle course, sometimes incorporating Wagnerian traits into his music and at other times avoiding them.

Chabrier was associated with some of the leading writers and painters of his time. Among his closest friends was the painter Édouard Manet, and Chabrier collected Impressionist paintings long before they became fashionable. A number of such paintings from his personal collection by artists known to him are now housed in some of the world's leading art museums. He penned a large number of letters to friends and colleagues which offer an insight into his musical opinions and character.

Chabrier died in Paris at the age of fifty-three from a neurological disease, probably caused by syphilis.

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Déodat de Sévérac

Gabriel Fauré

Gabriel Fauré was a French Romantic composer, organist, pianist and teacher. He was one of the foremost French composers of his generation, and his musical style influenced many 20th-century composers. Among his best-known works are his Pavane, Requiem, Nocturnes for piano and the songs Après un rêve and Clair de lune. Although his best-known and most accessible compositions are generally his earlier ones, Fauré composed many of his most highly regarded works in his later years, in a more harmonically and melodically complex style.
Fauré's music has been described as linking the end of Romanticism with the modernism of the second quarter of the 20th century. When he was born, Chopin was still composing, and by the time of Fauré's death, jazz and the atonal music of the Second Viennese School were being heard. During the last twenty years of his life, he suffered from increasing deafness. In contrast with the charm of his earlier music, his works from this period are sometimes elusive and withdrawn in character, and at other times turbulent and impassioned.

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