Sparks From Ashes

Czech repertoire has occupied a special place in the heart of Scottish tenor Nicky Spence since his student days, when a performance of Janáček’s Jenůfa at English National Opera blew him away with its ‘honesty and immediacy’ and inspired him to begin exploring the composer’s songs and operas himself.

He’s since established himself as one of Janáček’s foremost non-native interpreters, with a Gramophone Award-winning recording of The Diary of One Who Disappeared under his belt and stage credits including the roles of both Laca and Števa in Jenůfa, Tichon and Boris in Katya Kabanova, and the titular landlord in The Excursions of Mr Brouček at the Janáček Festival in Brno.

Spence’s relish of the Czech language comes across loud and clear on Sparks From Ashes, his debut album with pianist Dylan Perez (out today on Chandos); the rich and varied programme takes its title from a set of four songs by the tragically short-lived Vítězslava Kaprálová (1915-40), and also features cycles by Dvořák, Bartók, and Jaroslav Křička. The latter two works draw on the composers’ fascinations with musical folk traditions, and Spence (raised on a farm in Dumfries) seems especially in his element here: speaking to Presto about that recording of Janáček’s Diary back in 2019, he reflected that ‘I grew up singing folksongs, and I think there’s something of a resonance between my Celtic heritage and the land of Moravian folksong.’

We begin, though, in explicitly urbane territory, with Kaprálová’s luminous goodbye-note to her home city of Prague. Waving Farewell was composed in 1937, just before she relocated to Paris to study with Martinů, and Kaprálová’s writing looks to both past and future; the effect is akin to Debussy with a slight Czech accent, and the piece is shot through with a bittersweet tenderness which Spence and Perez capture to perfection. They’re fully alert, too, to the many subtle emotional shifts in what is essentially a short tone-poem (the piece also exists in an orchestral version, premiered by Rafael Kubelík after Kaprálová’s early death).

Next up is Dvořák’s Cypresses, written whilst the young composer was struggling with feelings for the woman who became his sister-in-law. If the poems by Gustav Pfleger-Moravský are occasionally a touch under-inspired, Dvořák’s responses and Spence’s lively engagement with text combine to make much of little: he’s particularly alive to the expressive possibilities of consonants, separating or delaying them for emotional effect, and he’s as eloquent when speaking low as he is at full cry (as in the fifteenth song, depicting crags and mountains, or the very end of the cycle).

Perez covers himself in glory in the numerous virtuosic postludes (try Nos. 8 and 15), and throughout the programme there’s a lovely sense of the pair being absolutely in tune with one another in terms of rubato, phrasing and dynamic shading – partners in life as well as in music, they married in 2022.

After nearly forty minutes of lovelorn soul-searching, Bartók’s bracing Village Scenes (compiled from a set of Slovakian folk-songs) supply a welcome dash of cold water: Spence enters into the spirit of things with gusto as hay is raked, goats are herded and wedding-parties get slightly out of hand, savouring the hard consonants and open-throated cries on high, as Perez does a fine job of imitating a rustic band underneath.

The mood changes again with Kaprálová’s melancholy Sparks From Ashes, written when she was just eighteen and dedicated to her ‘only love’ Otakar Vach; there’s a whiff of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande and Chansons de Bilitis here, and once again Spence proves that he’s just as adept at painting in shades of grey as he is when working with bold primary colours.

But the standout for me was the quirky trio of fables by Jaroslav Křička, depicting a brood of kid goats who fall victim to a nefarious vixen, a hen who is sent on a series of increasingly outlandish quests in order to obtain water for her dying rooster, and the fractious courtship between a heron and a crane. Spence has a whale of a time characterising the various animals in these dialogue-heavy, text-driven little vignettes, but there’s pathos aplenty in each song too…no spoilers, but none end happily.