New Town Concerts: Carolyn Sampson
Queen’s Hall - 23/10/23
A sparkling concert to brighten a Monday evening.
The New Town Concerts have been an important part of Edinburgh’s chamber music life for many years. Each year they bring a series of international quality concerts to Edinburgh. This is all done with no funding from Creative Scotland but is due to the good work of volunteers behind the New Town Concerts, and to the audience who subscribe to their concerts. This year is no exception with an excellent series of concerts from October to March at the Queens Hall beginning with tonight’s lovely concert by Carolyn Sampson, accompanied by Joseph Middleton.
Carolyn Sampson has sung all over the world and established a great reputation in the opera house and the concert platform. She has been a regular visitor to Edinburgh over the years, singing with the Dunedin Consort among others. My memories of Carolyn are of a great voice and great frocks! So I wasn’t disappointed when Carolyn came on the stage tonight in a sparkling golden dress, alongside her very fine accompanist Joseph Middleton. She sparkled from the beginning, opening with Parry’s ‘My heart is like a singing bird’, based on Christina Rosetti’s poem, “A Birthday”, followed by Leonard Bernstein’s ‘I hate music, but I love singing’. She then introduced the concert and the songs she was featuring. Some of these will feature in her new recording which remarkably is going to be her 100th recording; as she said, “I began very young!” Carolyn has a remarkable voice which is at home in the opera house as well as the concert hall; indeed she came to Edinburgh from Berlin where she is in the midst of rehearsal for ‘Medee’, under the direction of controversial US director Peter Sellars. When I met Carolyn after the concert I wished her well in Berlin, having met Peter Sellars in Australia when he was the short-lived director of the Adelaide Festival. I know of his controversial reputation as well as his considerable achievements!
Carolyn used the whole range and power of her voice tonight from her delicate delivery of Schubert’s ‘An die Musik’ to the very modern sounds of ‘Parfum de l’instant’ by Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho. Her programme was wide including quite a lot of French music, as well as songs by Wolf, Brahms, Marx and Franck, and ending with songs for sleep by Samuel Barber and Ivor Gurney. In her concert she was greatly aided by her accompanist Joseph Middleton who is now acknowledged as one of the leading pianists and accompanists of our time; his accompaniment tonight was perfect, delicate, melodic and enabling the beauty of Carolyn’s voice to shine. They both got a very warm reception from a decent sized audience in the Queens Hall and Carolyn rewarded us with an encore, a beautiful rendition of Strauss’s ‘Morgen’. it was a perfect end to a sparkling evening.
