Beth Taylor on The Deeps Have Music

Currently taking Covent Garden by storm in her house debut as the tenacious Bradamante in Handel's Alcina (opposite Lisette Oropesa, Emily D'Angelo and Mary Bevan), rich-voiced Scottish mezzo Beth Taylor is also set for a busy autumn on the recordings front, featuring on Sir Simon Rattle's new account of Mahler's 'Resurrection' Symphony from Munich (out tomorrow on BR Klassik) and singing the role of Cornelia on two new Giulio Cesares (Harry Bicket's set with the English Concert, Louise Alder and Christophe Dumaux landed a couple of weeks ago, and Francesco Corti's live recording with Il pomo d’oro, Sabine Devieilhe and Jakub Józef Orliński is coming up in mid-November...).

But it's Beth's brillliant debut recital album with pianist Hamish Brown (out tomorrow on Linn) which is the main focus when I meet her in a break from Alcina rehearsals to discuss her intriguing water-themed programme centring on Elgar's Sea Pictures (using Brown's enriched version of the composer's own piano score) and also including songs by Hedwige Chrétien, Ethel Smyth, Alma Mahler plus a striking new commission from Cameron Biles-Liddell. Despite greeting me with a big smile, she's obviously been crying when she shows up - although we soon establish that the trigger was an entirely positive one...

How are Alcina rehearsals treating you?

I’m doing so much stargazing this week…I’m in awe of Lisette, Emily and Mary, and I’ve just got back from Alice Coote’s recital of Tchaikovsky and Mahler at Wigmore Hall. She moved the entire room to tears, in case you’re wondering why I’ve got mascara all over my face! As you’ll see from my playlist, Alice is one of my idols because there’s something chemical about what she does – it’s the most unapologetic artistry, without any kind of pretence or armour. We’ve worked together once or twice, and she’s absolutely the kind of singer I aspire to be.

I’ve taken some bold steps with my debut album - not least in recording Sea Pictures with piano - and at times I’ve questioned whether I was mad to do that at this stage in my career! But I’m trying to channel that unapologetic quality which I so admire in Alice: it’s a snapshot of who I am right now, and I’m excited to put it out there!

How has the piano version been received in performance?

It’s met with some pushback from Elgar superfans, but I think people just need a bit of reassurance that we’re not doing anything to destroy the fabric of the piece! We believe that Elgar’s own piano version did exist before the orchestral score, although it might’ve been intended for rehearsal rather than performance. Hamish has written a wonderful essay about the changes he’s made, but the short version is that he’s taken a few extra details from the orchestral score to give the piano part slightly more body - by his own admission Elgar wasn’t a great pianist! It’s just a case of adding a wee bit more stock to an already rich gravy!

The music really does speak for itself, and it has to do so much work for the poetry – some of which is quite bizarre! As is the case with a lot of Elgar, sometimes it’s the text which causes a bit of resistance: it’s the same with The Dream of Gerontius, which sometimes disconcerts European ears because it’s so High Catholic. If you’re not in that world already, the text doesn’t always speak immediately, although I’m not Catholic and it’s one of my favourite pieces! It’s about coming together to share a deeply spiritual experience regardless of your own background, and I think Sea Pictures is the same. Being a part of that is one of our greatest privileges as singers.

How do you pace yourself in music which has such a strong emotional impact?

You need to be careful in curating a recital programme around a work that digs this deep, but sometimes you have to learn the hard way! I remember taking the cycle to Sarah Connolly when she did a day of coaching at Glyndebourne, and she advised me never to programme it at the end of a recital because it’s so vocally and emotionally exhausting. I noted that advice down, then went and disobeyed it because I had a programme where it didn’t make sense to put Sea Pictures anywhere except the end – I actually preferred it because then you can really let go! I did a jump-in recital recently where I had to follow it with Frauenliebe und -leben, and that was a mistake in terms of emotional pacing!

Do you make different interpretative choices when you’re singing the cycle with piano rather than orchestra?

I always feel like there’s more room for play when there’s just you and one other person: even in the studio there’s a kind of live conversational element at work. But when you’re performing the piece with an orchestra it’s not all about you – I think singers have to remember that, even when we're the soloist! I've been very lucky in that the conductors I’ve worked with on it are huge Elgar nerds: people like Martyn Brabbins and Ed Gardner have such a reverence for Elgar and know their orchestras inside-out. I trust them 100%!

But when it’s just me and Hamish, we want to encourage people to give the intimacy of the piece more of a chance. We used a full-size concert grand which already had an orchestral presence of its own, so our approach was to let the piece breathe and lean into that tidal quality in the music. There are other songs on the album which are more compact and salon-friendly – we’re a duo that loves to try anything and everything! Sea Pictures and the Alma Mahler songs were our opportunity to be a bit more expansive.

The Hedwige Chrétien songs are certainly a delightful contrast!

I discovered her completely by accident when I was researching another French composer, Mel Bonis, who wrote some amazing pieces about the sea. I didn’t want to spoon-feed the theme just because we were desperate to record Sea Pictures, but it’s clearly a water programme. Eighty minutes is already quite generous for a CD, but there was so much we had to leave out: more Schubert, Nadia and Lili Boulanger, all sorts! 

The reason I went with Chrétien over Mel Bonis was exactly that contrast you mention – I’m quite a visual person, and they looked so playful on the page. I came across a wonderful recording by Cyrille Dubois, who of course does them in the high keys: it’s so floaty and ethereal, but I was curious about how they would sound in a lower voice. Those first three songs are so characterful that you could almost stage them, and the last one is a little microcosm on its own. The whole set is only about ten minutes in total. 

Chrétien was primarily known for her piano music, like a lot of women composers of her time…right up to Germaine Tailleferre, who is my absolute favourite woman composer. I couldn’t find any songs by her which would fit into this programme, but that’ll be my next project!

Chrétien, Mel Bonis and Marie Jaëll have been wonderful discoveries for me, and I’ve programmed a lot of music by French female composers in my recitals over the years. In 2024 I did a recital with the fantastic pianist and clavichordist Marcia Hadjimarkos to mark the centenary of Fauré’s death, and we didn’t give the audience the programme in advance – Fauré was actually the only male composer featured, but so many people thought everything was by him! They got a little slip revealing the repertoire afterwards, and there were some very surprised faces!

Were conversations about gender-diverse programming already happening during your student days?

There was certainly no resistance, but programming songs by women wasn’t actively encouraged – you had to make sure that you had the standard Schubert, Fauré and Schumann under your belt, and I didn’t really see people talking about women composers until I was a postgraduate. When I left college the only one I’d ever programmed was Alma Mahler – I hadn't even looked at Gustav by that point! 

I was lucky that my teachers encouraged me to get a library of song material together for myself when I was a young singer, because opera repertoire generally comes much later for my voice-type. I spent a lot of fun afternoons in music libraries just picking a letter at random and seeing who was there: had I heard of them, had they written songs, where did they come from? That’s what made me enjoy recital curation and programming as much as I do, because it’s a great privilege to discover and share forgotten music. At the moment I'm all about Tailleferre and Augusta Holmès, who often wrote her own texts: her music fuses French and Irish soundworlds, and it’s exactly what I need right now! 

And that process of discovering and sharing things is so much easier these days thanks to IMSLP and the wonderful online hivemind of singers and song-pianists – I’ll often ask colleagues to have a wee look in their library if I’m struggling to find something, and I’m always happy to return the favour! Keys can be an issue with certain composers who had a preference for higher voices, but if I can get something transposed then I’ll share it with other folk who want to try it. It all becomes a lovely big melting-pot: a community with the same purpose of keeping music as a journey of discovery.

Speaking of song transpositions, I’d love to hear you in Strauss’s Four Last Songs if a low-voice edition ever materialises!

It’s funny you say that, because I was just talking to Hamish about this…He’s thinking about doing a new piano version (which is badly needed), and I’m trying to persuade him to do one in lower keys while he’s at it! I’m not really a Strauss singer, but they’re such great songs – why not give them a go in a small recital space and just see what happens?

Returning to Alma Mahler, her music is often programmed with Gustav’s - do you feel they occupy similar soundworlds?

Alma’s songs strike me as deeply intellectual, especially now that I’ve done some of them with orchestra: in a way they feel more refined than Gustav’s, even the ones which were written earlier. I have done programmes where they've been bunched together as a way of telling their story, but I do love it when I can just throw her in alongside Fauré or Duparc or Rachmaninoff and present her on her own terms. Things have evolved in such a short space of time: when I was a student it was a bit out-there to programme Alma rather than Gustav, and I think there are one or two more which are about to be published…

How did the commission from Cameron Biles-Liddell come about?

We met at the Three Choirs Festival a couple years ago when I was singing a 90-second solo in Holst’s The Cloud Messenger; Cameron was there as part of an Emerging Composers scheme, and he said he’d love to write for me at some point. Our paths crossed again when Martyn Brabbins and I were touring Sea Pictures around Wales, and Cameron reiterated his offer. I knew I wanted to commission something by an emerging composer for this album by that point, but I hadn’t really put any feelers out. He gave me some songs to listen to, and I felt like he had exactly what we needed in terms of atmosphere and scope. A couple of months later he handed me these pieces, and I was blown away by the poetry he chose and the colours he uses. 

He makes such striking use of your low register - was that something you requested?

I suggested it and Cameron went ‘Right, hold my beer…’! He wasn’t afraid to go to extremes with me, and I love that. This was my first experience of working with a composer, and I didn’t want to be one of those singers who’s super-prescriptive about what works in their voice:  I’d rather not sing twelve top Bs, but I can handle two or three! 

I’ve since worked with Stuart MacRae on a song-cycle called Medusa, and both he and Cameron spent a lot of time listening to my recordings and figuring out what colours would suit me. Cameron did workshops with us for The Breakers, and Hamish was very direct about pointing out places in the piano part where they needed to readjust the grammar: I don’t really know what that means, to be honest, but they did!

Cameron also arranged a beautiful Orcadian song for me to sing at the Edinburgh Festival, and that was the piece which everybody talked about because it was so raw and tragic. His harp concerto Nature’s Dance has just been premiered by the former Official Royal Harpist Alis Huws and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, so he’s really going places and I’m so happy that this album is going to give him more exposure.