The sudden death of Madeleine Dring in 1977 at the age of just 53 cut short a multi-faceted portfolio life spent composing, arranging, singing and acting in both theatre and concert-hall, a career feeding off the energy of tight deadlines and pragmatic musical problems to solve. Centuries earlier she might have praised as a polymath, but in the 20th century – suspicious of dilettantism and ever-mindful of genius – Dring fell (like several of her female contemporaries) outside acceptable classical parameters.
A partial edition of Dring’s songs has latterly helped address the neglect, as has the championship of her widower, long-time LSO Principal Oboist Roger Lord. Dring’s works – many conveniently small-scale, ripe for recital-cameos – are beginning to creep more regularly into both recordings and live performance, and her set of Five Betjeman songs has found a solid foothold in the repertoire. But what about the rest?
British mezzo Kitty Whately and pianist Julius Drake are the latest musicians to take up Dring’s musical banner in this pick-n-mix program that largely eschews complete cycles in favour of single songs from right across the composer’s wide stylistic range. American commentators have compared Dring to Gershwin, but the English lineage of a musician taught by both Howells and Vaughan Williams is immediately evident, even if the influences fall more into the groove between popular and classical styles – Quilter; Novello; Coward – with a smattering of French harmonic inflections shaped by Dring’s beloved Poulenc, as well as Reynaldo Hahn.
The photographs included here give a vivid taste of Dring’s glamorous theatrical life – mirrored in salon songs that have the ease of incidental music. The rhapsodic, ballad-intensity of Echoes sits just the right side of musical melodrama, melismatic effusions opening up a more operatic landscape – a trick Dring also pulls off in My True Love Hath My Heart, which grows to unexpected stature from tidy strophic beginnings. Breezy insouciance comes courtesy of It Was A Lover, as well as Suckling-setting Encouragements to a Lover, with its jog-trot piano accompaniment and archly comic vocal inflection. And then there’s the gently mock-medieval Melisande, a pretty, melancholy little pastiche, whether truly based on a “14th-century French air” or not.
As the recording progresses, we push out into deeper musical waters. The Faithless Lover is a nervy perpetuum mobile, rhythmically and harmonically unsettled – intrusive thoughts returning obsessively in an insistent rhythmic idée-fixe. Dring’s 1976 Four Night Songs is the composer at her boldest and, often, sparest – as in Holding the Night’s sinuous melodic arabesques and Frost Night’s sharp-edged gleam. It’s moving to hear the heartbeat pulse of final song Separation – completed by Lord after Dring’s death – fulfilling the poem’s image of a lover “sleeping out of my reach”.
Whately is an expressive singer, always with text to the fore, and her performances have all the intimacy of an after-dinner recital around the piano. Despite invitations from the music, she keeps delivery sober, allowing the natural warmth of her coppery mezzo to do all the emotional heavy lifting. Drake’s accompaniments fit like a silk opera-glove; the piano was Dring’s own instrument, and you can hear the pleasure in the detail and elegance of the writing – showcased in a delicious encore of Dring’s own arrangement of Cole Porter classic In the Still of the Night.
Composer: Madeleine Dring
Works: Songs
Performers: Kitty Whately ms, Julius Drake p
Label: Chandos CHAN20390
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