Songs of Innocence and Experience – Higginson

Some composers spend a career waiting for the right performers to walk through the door. Gary Higginson, on the evidence of this Regent disc, is still waiting in places — and has found them, gloriously, in others.

He is not a familiar name south of the river Cam, and I doubt he loses sleep over that. A pupil, at various points, of John Joubert, Edmund Rubbra, and Patric Standford — a lineage that tells you a good deal before you’ve heard a note. Rubbra’s granitic contrapuntal conscience, Joubert’s harmonic tang, Standford’s word-setting sensitivity: all three ghosts hover somewhere behind these pieces, though Higginson has long since made the idiom his own, tonal but restless, never quite settling into the pastoral fog that swallows so many English composers of his generation.

The two Blake cycles that frame the program — Seven Songs of William Blake, Set 1, op. 33, from 1977, and its companion Set 2, op. 55, assembled over 1979–82 — are the meat of the disc, and they reward close listening more than they reward casual delight. Higginson’s decision to derive the whole first set from a fourteenth-century Catalan pilgrim tune, heard plain in the opening song and then subjected to a set of increasingly free variations, is the kind of formal cunning you don’t notice until the fourth or fifth hearing, at which point it becomes hard to un-hear. A hand drum announces that first song with a faint, almost ritual thud — processional, ceremonial, oddly moving in context — and returns, more fleetingly, in the sixth.

The third song of op. 33 is a duet, soprano and bass, and here I have to lodge a complaint that has nothing to do with Higginson’s writing. The music wants — demands, really — a maturity of tone and word-pointing that the young singers on this recording simply don’t yet possess. They get the pitches. They get the rhythms. What Blake requires, though, is a sense of experience pressing up against innocence, a knowingness in the voice that contradicts the words being sung, and that’s precisely the dimension missing. It’s a problem that recurs elsewhere on the disc — good, well-drilled young voices, not quite ripe.

Where the performers are right, the disc catches fire. Charlotte de Rothschild, singing with harpist Danielle Perrett, brings exactly the tonal shading and rhythmic freedom this repertoire wants. “Miri it is,” barely a minute long, is a small perfect thing — de Rothschild floats the vowel sounds with an ache that belies the brevity. The “Ceres Song” from The Tempest and the two other Shakespeare settings that flank it (the “Fairies Song” and “Over hill, over dale”) show Higginson at his most instinctively theatrical; you can practically see Perrett’s harp glinting under stage light, arpeggios catching the ear like scattered light on water. “How beautiful is the rain,” dating from 1983, is a miniature I’d happily hear programmed alongside Britten’s folksong arrangements — it has that same knack of sounding both very old and freshly minted.

“A song of joy,” op. 165 no. 2, from 2011, is the disc’s largest single utterance outside the Blake sets — eight and a half minutes that never sag, harp and voice trading material with an ease that suggests real collaborative trust between composer and performers. Danielle Perrett, it should be said, plays throughout with a clarity of articulation — no smudging, no over-pedaled wash of sound — that lets Higginson’s often quite intricate figuration register properly. Her two unaccompanied Studies, op. 132, are the disc’s least essential music, pleasant enough, but they function more as palate-cleanser than substance.

The choral contributions — the Chapel Choir of Selwyn College, Cambridge, joined by the Ely Cathedral Girls’ Choir under Sarah MacDonald — bring energy and evident commitment to the motet Et omnes eandem escam spiritualem ederunt, op. 130, a compact and rather radiant essay in close harmony that rewards more attention than its three-and-a-half minutes might suggest. MacDonald draws clean, well-tuned singing from forces that are, inevitably, still finding their collective voice; the ensemble is disciplined without ever quite achieving the last ounce of blend a professional consort would supply. Six Birds, op. 161, is a late, slighter piece — five minutes of quick character sketches, agreeably scored, gone before you’ve quite settled into it.

“Lead kindly light,” extracted from the 1991 Requiem, op. 111, is the disc’s most searching single track — nearly five minutes of restrained, harmonically ambiguous writing that suggests Higginson’s Requiem as a whole deserves a hearing nobody seems in a hurry to give it. “A last confession,” barely two minutes, closes its corner of the program on a note of quiet unease that I found more haunting than almost anything in the Blake cycles.

There is, inevitably, no rival release to weigh this against — Higginson’s discography remains thin enough that Regent’s engineers (the sound is warm, close, sympathetic to the harp’s transients without ever becoming boomy) have effectively defined how we’ll hear this music for a while. That’s a responsibility, and mostly they’ve met it. I’d rather have this uneven, occasionally under-sung, frequently lovely disc than no disc at all — and for anyone curious about an English composer who’s spent four dec