SwanSongs – Melodramas

Legendary baritone Gregory Yurisch returns to the stage in a unique programme of melodramas. The Romantics loved this genre—spoken text over dramatic music, with vivid imagery and high-octane plots. Who better to conjure the best from words and music than Placido Domingo's favourite baritone and master musician Yurisich? Music by Schubert, Poulenc and Richard Strauss.

"Melodramatic" is a word that conjures good old-fashioned high drama, as in black-and-white movies, larger-than-life gestures, colourful plots and sticky ends for all involved. If that sounds like an average opera plot then there's a good reason—nineteenth-century composers and audiences revelled in this world of contrasts and extremes. After all, how can you write an opera about an average person on an average day?

The melodrama was a great favourite, where text was declaimed over dramatic music, and this idea lives on in the movie soundtrack. Live soundtrack performances have become hugely popular, with the movies showing on a big screen. So imagine if the actors were there in the room too!

Richard Strauss took on the tragic tale of Enoch Arden, by Tennyson, even publishing it with his own money. Enoch needs money to support his family, and goes back to sea with his old captain. He is shipwrecked though, and his few companions die, leaving him marooned for ten long years. Eventually returning home, he discovers that his wife believes him to be dead, and has married a rival suitor from way back in childhood. Enoch never reveals himself to his family, loving them so much that he cannot mar their happiness, and dies brokenhearted.

We continue with Schubert's Farewell to the World, surprisingly his only melodrama, considering his almost 700 songs. In his last moments, the speaker only now really understands the world's joys and sorrows. He elects to take joy with him to the afterlife, leaving Master Sorrow behind. He bids Sorrow to be a gentle teacher, letting people feel love so that they will give thanks and leave the world a serener place.

Finally, we have a complete change of tone with Poulenc's enchanting The Story of Babar the little elephant, based of course on the first picture book in the series by Jean de Brunhoff. Poulenc dedicated the work to his "young second cousins and friends" but this is far from being simply a piece for children, much as they would enjoy it. Many of Poulenc's musical fingerprints are here - racy dances, sumptuous harmonies and breathtaking nocturnes. Its charm and vivacity is all the more astonishing when you realise that it was written in 1940, after the catastrophic fall of France.

The music has to be larger-than-life to match these scenes, of course, and the world-class instruments in the Steinway Gallery offer all the colours of an orchestra in miniature. The artists are perfectly matched to this programme. Gregory Yurisich was a world-class baritone for three decades, described by Placido Domingo as his "favourite". Now retired from singing, he returns to the stage to bring all his musical, textual and vocal powers to bear, partnered by master accompanist David Wickham.

SwanSongs audiences have long requested piano solos from Wickham, and to set hearts and minds astir he presents Schubert's sublime Impromptu in C minor, and Poulenc's ebullient Three Novelettes.