‘The Deeps have Music’
Laidlaw Music Centre, St Andrews, 27/06/2025
Beth Taylor (mezzo-soprano) and Hamish Brown (piano)
It's now nearly 6 years since I met Beth Taylor, as we were half of the solo quartet in Mozart's Requiem in Glasgow Cathedral. I was very taken with this young Glaswegian mezzo-soprano, not long out of Music College at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, and we kept in touch. I was able to offer her some recital opportunities with me, and I got her to do an online interview on the EMR.
Fast forward a few years, and we find Beth acclaimed across the globe, singing at Carnegie Hall in New York, Glyndebourne, Los Angeles and Berlin with more and more exciting debuts planned. Her sensational appearance in the Cardiff Singer of the World on BBC in 2023 as a grand finalist alerted a much wider audience to her talent.
When I heard that she was recording a new solo album in St Andrews for Linn Records, with her superb accompanist, Hamish Brown, and was performing the music of that recording in the Laidlaw Music Centre on Friday 27th June. I knew I had to be there!
A decent audience had turned up, despite the clash of dates with the East Neuk Festival, and we were rewarded with a thrilling and deeply satisfying recital on a maritime theme, 'The Deeps have Music'.
Beth and Hamish began with a beautifully atmospheric Irish song by Hamilton Harty, 'My Lagan Love'. There is something about certain Irish and Scots melodies which instantly transport the native listener to their place of origin. For those of us with this Gaelic heritage, it awakens feelings of nostalgia and longing which cannot easily be expressed in words. Hamilton Harty, who was more famous for conducting the Hallé Orchestra in Manchester from 1920-1933 than anything else, was able in this song to identify that nostalgic element and carry the listener to an Irish river setting, where the gentle breeze and the evening sun play around the lovely hair of the poet's lover.
Beth Taylor captured that wistful side with her beautifully clear and haunting voice, while the crystalline intricacies of Hamish Brown's flawless piano technique provided the perfect accompaniment.
One of my first pieces of advice to young performers is to establish a clear rapport right from the beginning between singer and accompanist. Once you have achieved this, the audience can sit back and relax, safe in the knowledge that we have no worries about the performers.
Moving seamlessly into French, Beth and Hamish entertained us with six short songs (petits poèmes du bord de l'eau) by a composer of whom I, and I suspect 99% of the audience, was unfamiliar. Hedwigé Chrétien (1859-1944) wrote these songs to poems by Ludovic Frottolis in 1910, and they proved to be charming miniatures in the Fin du Siècle Impressionist mode.
A group of widely contrasting Schubert Lieder came next. The ethereal ‘Meeres Stille’ is one of Schubert's greatest masterpieces, a wonderful match of words and music, which evokes a totally placid seascape where not a ripple disturbs the surface of the water. Beth and Hamish conjured a deeply calm quality out of Schubert's minimalist score, followed immediately by the ghastly ‘Gruppe aus dem Tartarus’, a horror story of lost souls in Hell looking for salvation but finding only endless torment. I used to sing this fabulous song in my own recitals in my youth, and thoroughly enjoyed Beth's super-dramatic reading. The damning cry of ‘Ewigkeit’ as the souls learn of their eternal doom is utterly chilling, and Beth brought out the full force of her magnificent voice to announce it!
The Schubert group ended with ‘Lied eines Schiffers an die Dioskuren’, the beautiful expression of a boatman's gratitude to the twins Castor and Pollux, transformed into guiding stars to help sailors in their hour of need.
The next two songs, the first public performance of ‘The Breakers’, by Cameron Biles-Liddell, were something of a tour de force. Written for Beth and Hamish, these contrasting songs were devised to show the variety of moods and facets of the sea, from crashing storms to motionless stillness. Photographs of the Earth from space reveal the immensity of our oceans and seas, and remind us how mankind, despite all our advances, is still in thrall to the power of the waves. The whole recital and album have been planned to represent our vulnerability and subservience to the great seas of the planet, and this world premiere is at the heart of the programme.
Mr Biles-Liddell has developed his own clear compositional voice, even at the age of 28, and these two songs showed a fine understanding of how to set poetry to music. From the dramatic depiction of a storm at sea, and the terrified reaction of the sailors experiencing it, in E H Brodie's text, to the calm reflection of the moon on still waters in William Sharp's ‘Ode to a Nightingale in April’, Mr Biles-Liddell proved adept at using Beth's extraordinary range of vocal colours to great advantage. From the depths of her glorious contralto to the thrilling, glittering heights of her sensational top notes, the composer has created a small miracle of vocal excellence which duly received an ovation from the St Andrews audience. The writing for the piano was no less admirable and Hamish Brown played with distinction and bravery.
Alma Mahler has finally come out of the shadow of her famous first marriage to Gustav and we are now fully aware of her own compositional skills. ‘Lobgesang’ is a fitting crystallization of an extraordinary life, describing the many moods and facets of both the sea and love. Her relationships throughout her long life (she died in 1964, 53 years after Gustav) have acted as punctuation marks in her story, but we must not forget how talented she was in her own right. Beth and Hamish revealed the essence of her music in a tightly controlled performance.
Ethel Smyth's ‘Three Moods of the Sea’, dating from 1913, are settings of Walt Whitman, again depicting the multifarious aspects of the sea, using symbolism and impressionist harmonies. I sang in the first performance since her death of Smyth's opera, 'The Wreckers', in a BBC Prom in the mid-90s, and although somewhat over-melodramatic, I recall that she possessed an individual style of composition that was very interesting. I was slightly less enamoured of these three songs, but Beth and Hamish played them to the hilt!
The recital was brought to a splendid conclusion by a new piano arrangement by Hamish Brown of Edward Elgar's 'Sea Pictures'. Famously premiered in 1899 by Clara Butt dressed as a mermaid, this cycle of five songs has been sung by all the great contraltos over the intervening years, and Beth Taylor now adds her personal take on them.
I must at this point make an admission. I have never really "got" Elgar! I like the cello concerto (although for me it needs the overpowering performance by Jacqueline du Pré to fully justify itself) and I love 'The Apostles', which I sang for the first time in Canterbury Cathedral 35 years ago. Sadly, most of the rest of his oeuvre passes me by. I have heard Beth brilliantly singing 'The Dream of Gerontius' in the Usher Hall earlier this year, and now I have heard her singing 'Sea Pictures ' here, and it is no reflection on her singing or her interpretation that I remain unmoved.
I can only say here that she and Hamish delivered an excellent performance which was much appreciated by the rest of the audience. The duo was tempted to perform a dramatic encore of Hamilton Harty's ‘Sea Wrack’, and very splendid it was. The concert raised funds for the RNLI Lifeboat Association, a very worthy cause and a fitting charity to benefit from this maritime programme.
The album is due for release early in 2026 and I will draw our readers' attention to it nearer the time.
