CD recording with Beth Taylor (mezzo-soprano) and Hamish Brown (piano)
Linn Records
Regular readers will know of my long acquaintance with Beth Taylor, ever since we sang Mozart’s Requiem together in Glasgow Cathedral in September 2019, and how I initially encouraged her and latterly watched in admiration as she has scaled the dizzying heights of international stardom. Recent appearances with Sir Simon Rattle in Germany, singing Mahler, a debut recital at the Edinburgh International Festival (also appearing with me in the Fringe in Afternoon Arias!) and a debut at Covent Garden in Handel’s ‘Alcina,’ have brought her name to the fore, and this debut solo album, with her wonderful accompanist, Hamish Brown, comes at a very good moment.
It’s also a very good album! ‘The Deeps have Music’ explores the fascinating way that the sea has influenced many composers, and all the songs, in several languages, explore this relationship of mankind with the ocean. It was recorded in the Laidlaw Centre in the University of St Andrews, in June 2025, produced and engineered by Philip Hobbs, and the sound is extremely impressive with a wide range of dynamics.
I am going to break with my usual rules here, since I know both performers and have sung in concert with both of them, and so will refer to them in this review by their first names.
The CD starts with a deeply moving Irish song, ‘My Lagan Love’, the poem either written or compiled by Joseph Campbell and set to music by Hamilton Harty, an Irish composer and conductor. Slow moving chords and a restrained vocal line, emphasising Beth’s sumptuous lower contralto range, take us into the mind of a young man, possibly on the Donegal coast, as he muses on a solitary country girl, his thoughts totally absorbed in her sensuous beauty.
Next comes a curiosity, a set of six short songs by the little known French composer, Hedwige Chrétien (1859-1944): ‘Petits Poèmes du Bord de L’Eau’ with texts by Ludovic Fortolis. Written around 1910, these songs are reminiscent of the many songs of Francis Poulenc, snippets of music and poetry on a watery theme. They introduce us to Beth’s mezzo-soprano range, and also to Hamish’s mercurial piano accompaniment, as wisps of cloud and strands of willow branches flit across the musical canvas. In very good French, Beth tells us of the influence of water on love and life, specifically river-related here, as we drift along in the stream, even attracting a water nymph, and finally glimpsing the cold depths of a river in winter.
Moving to Schubert, Beth sings the serene but disturbing 'Meeres Stille', a poem by Goethe where a boatman finds himself on a sea without waves or swell, a terrifying nothingness. Not a breath of wind is felt, and it is not a comfortable situation. Great breath control by the singer almost makes the listener gulp in fear.
The next song, ‘Gruppe aus dem Tartarus’ (Group from Hades), frightening in a different way, is one I sang many times in my career, an invocation by Schiller of lost souls in the underworld desperate for release. Like a murmuring in an angry sea, the tormented cry out for an end to their hellish existence only to be met by an unequivocal NO from the Lord of the Underworld. An Eternity of damnation is your lot, He cries. Great singing and playing from the duo!
Finally, in this group, is the 'Song of the Seaman’ to the twin stars, Castor and Pollux, the Dioscuri, Mayrhofer’s paean to the stars which guide all sailors. Schubert’s beautiful song evokes both the sea and the traveller, and it takes us to a safe place amid the terrors of the sea. I would have preferred a slightly lower key for Beth here, She never sounds in difficulty, but I think she might find more vocal colours down a little – small margins!
Cameron Biles-Liddell wrote two contrasting songs in 'The Breakers', in 2025, dedicated to Beth and Hamish, and we heard them live in the duo’s Edinburgh International Festival debut in the Queen’s Hall in August. Hearing then again on this disc, it is clear that the composer has an excellent understanding of Beth’s voice, focussing on the warmth and intensity of her contralto range, but allowing her to soar to possibly unimagined heights as well. These two songs, to poems by Erasmus Brodie and William Sharp, late Victorians both, are well contrasted, the first describing the approach of a violent storm and the other an evocation of twilight, as the moon’s power takes over from the sun on a river.
Both the songs are excellent examples of modern composition, written in a new but harmonically acceptable idiom with fine use of word painting. The approach of the dramatic storm was brilliantly depicted, and Beth and Hamish rose to the challenge of some big leaps (at one point touching top A) as well as some really deep singing. Mr Biles-Liddell writes very well for the voice, and Beth’s in particular, eschewing some of the modern fad for making his singer scream at the top of her range. Everything seems designed to get the words clear and the meaning lucid.
The second song, ‘Twilight’, not directly marine-related, ties in with the Schubert, ‘Meeres Stille’, as, again, water moving silently yet inexorably carries an eerie threat. William Sharp was an enigmatic Scottish poet, an advocate of neo-paganism, who published under two personalities, one a woman, Fiona Macleod. The song is set to Sharp’s poem, ‘On a Nightingale in April’, and its obscure references add to the mysterious atmosphere, made all the more disturbing by using Beth’s contralto register, an other-wordly sound, for the most part. I found these two songs perhaps the most interesting of all the songs on this disc, and my good impression in the EIF recital was confirmed by a second and more detailed listen here.
The next song on the programme is 'Lobgesang' (Song of Praise) by Alma Mahler-Werfel, one of four songs published in 1924 by Mahler’s widow. With a text by Richard Dehmel, it compares love to the sea, wild and tempestuous on the surface but unmoving and silent in the deeps. I found it a really wonderful poem but Alma Mahler doesn’t seem to get near its essence. It is a magnificent vehicle for Beth’s superb voice, and indeed, as a musical work, it’s all-encompassing in its range and brilliant in performance. Alma’s unbelievable life story, with a succession of relationships and marriages to some of the most important artists of the early 20th century (Zemlinsky, Klimt, Mahler, Kokoschka, Gropius and Werfel) certainly gives her the right to compose a song about love, but I didn’t find it got to grips with the astonishing poetry of Dehmel here. A tiny example – after some dramatic singing about the fierce sea, the section where the poet talks about the eerie silence of the deep ocean suddenly finds the singer yelling (beautifully) the words ‘ewige Ruhe, ungestört’ (eternal silence, undisturbed) on a climactic top note. I know Beth is a devotee of Alma Mahler, but, for me, the jury is still out!
We move on to Ethel Smythe’s ‘Three Moods of the Sea’ from 1913, an interesting group of songs from an enigmatic composer. I sang a role in the first revival, since its composition, of Smythe’s opera, ‘The Wreckers’ at a BBC Prom in the Albert Hall in the late 1990s, and found it a strangely fascinating piece. These songs reveal an idiosyncratic composer with a good grasp of how to write for the voice. With texts by Arthur Symons, the symbolist poetry and Smythe’s impressionistic music combine to create a satisfying group of songs, firstly depicting the deathly stillness of a calm sea, and then portraying the disturbing lull before a storm. The final song, perhaps the best, reveals the peaceful calmness of the sea as twilight slips into the light of the moon and the stars. Beth and Hamish also combine to do full justice to these fine songs.
I have never been able to respond favourably to the music of Edward Elgar (except his superb oratorio, ‘The Apostles’), and even Beth and Hamish’s brilliant performance of his Sea Pictures (from 1899) could not persuade me otherwise. Maybe it’s the crazy picture in my mind of the first singer of the piece, Clara Butt, in Norwich on 5th October 1899, wearing a mermaid costume, but I can’t take this piece of Victoriana, often religious Victoriana, seriously. Beth sings it absolutely magnificently, with her sonorous chest voice contralto rising to thrilling top notes – a big top A at the climax of the final song. Hamish Brown, who has adapted Elgar’s own piano reduction of the original orchestrated songs brilliantly, plays with total conviction and great skill. I enjoyed the atmospheric quality of the first song, 'Sea Slumber Song' (words by Roden Noel), and the rolling barcarolle of ‘Where Corals lie’ (text by Richard Garnett) is very catchy, but much of the rest leaves me cold and indeed antagonistic to the composer, whose pomposity and syrupy Catholicism make this confirmed atheist baulk. Elgar lovers will enjoy every second of this cycle, and Beth and Hamish perform it to the hilt. Chacun à son goût!
The CD ends with another Hamilton Harty song, ‘Sea Wrack’, one that Beth has sung a couple of times in concerts with me over the years, a tale of lost love amid the brown seaweed (wrack) which covers much of the Irish coastline. It’s a great end to the programme, and shows off Beth’s dramatic powers as well as her vocal ones. For some reason, there are no programme notes about this piece in the sleeve notes – a mistake perhaps? The notes in general are generous and helpful, as are all the texts, so I can’t work out why there is nothing about 'Sea Wrack'. There are also large expanses of nothing in the sleeve, which is a shame, and the disc itself is hard to take out of the sleeve as are the notes. Maybe a little tweaking of future copies might be worthwhile?
The overall impression of this CD recording is enormously positive, and the performances of Beth and Hamish are exemplary. The legacy of Dame Janet Baker in this repertoire is hard to avoid, but I can say unequivocally that Beth Taylor is the true successor to that great singer, and already possesses an even finer instrument than the great Dame. Beth’s ability to sing Wagner, and her amazing coloratura in the Bel Canto repertoire, set her apart from almost everyone at the moment, and this first solo CD recording is a clear marker in her continuing progress.
photo credit: Linn Records