 Echo - The Songs of Horace Keats
Available in all ABC shops or here online
This recording features two stars of
Opera Australia, New Zealand soprano Wendy Dixon and Australian baritone John Pringle
accompanied by violinist Marina Marsden and pianist David Miller.
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One way and another I have been listening to a great deal of English
song, or more accurately settings of poetry in English, over the last six months. There
has been John Williamson's A.E. Housman settings, Margaret Wegener's songs, both on small
British labels, Butterworth, Warlock and Finzi (Decca's British Music Collection) and
Benjamin Burrows in a very recent British Music Society collection on the Ensemble label.
Now along comes a fascinating addition from an unexpected source.
Horace Keats was born in London and having left home at the age of 16
earned a living as pianist aboard the great transatlantic liners. There he met the diseuse
Nella Webb. On a tour to Australia with Miss Webb he met and was persuaded to stay by two
of the great singers of the day, Peter Dawson and Ella Caspers. He worked extensively in
the Australian theatre and cinema world and soon moved into broadcasting. He died just a
year before Granville Bantock (his elder by twenty-seven years) a composer whose songs
many of Keats's resemble.
The present collection of songs are from the 1930s and 1940s written in
the last decade of Keats' life. They are not drawing room ballads. They also stand clear
of the type churned out by Stanford - with two exceptions. The first is Drake's Call
- clearly written with Songs of the Sea and Songs of the Fleet in the
sights. It was perhaps a song written with Dawson in the memory. White Heather is
an exercise in Celtic shamrockery written to suit John McCormack though sung by a woman.
This is more Bax than Stanford.
On the other hand the songs are not impressionistic - or not very
impressionistic. The Point of Noon and Moonlit Apples which is as dewily
luxuriant as the buzzing unDelian summer evoked by Havergal Brian in his Fifth Symphony The
Wine of Summer. They stand well away from the alienation of the Second Viennese
clique. Had Keats gone down that avenue he might have experienced less of an occlusion
during the period from 1950 to 1990. Lauris Elms recorded an LP of Keats's songs in 1972
but apart from that and the Keats chapter of various Australian singing competitions this
music has slept deeply.
What we have is a composer who is in his element in the late romantic
field. He can embrace sentimentality without embarrassment as in The Roads Beside the
Sea (recorded in the 1940s by Harold Williams) which reeks agreeably of Montague
Phillips and Haydn Wood. Keats is far more straightforward than Othmar Schoeck. Less
oblique than Bernard van Dieren but more populist than most Warlock. Imagine a cross
between the sultry warmth of Bantock, the Humbert Wolfe songs of Gustav Holst, the songs
of Hahn and of Finzi and Ireland in their occasional balladeer style.
Yellow Bracken, taken from the massive novel, Wolf Solent,
vigorously sets John Cowper Powys, that Celt-mystic and Wessex aspirant-successor to
Hardy. Love's Secret is turbulently romantic - operatically so - recalling the
terrible outcome of Tess's admission to Angel in Tess of the d'Urbervilles. In Sea-Wraith
the words "and he who looks must look again" vibrates with the Housman spirit of
that master lyric musician C.W. Orr. The Trespass is gestural and strongly shaped
by knowledge of Rachmaninov's piano style. It glories in love as much as Vaughan Williams
and Gurney glory in the ploughing teams and the turning furrow. Bantock (Sappho)
and Holst (Rig Veda songs) are reflected in Over the Quiet Waters, the song
Keats dedicated to his son Russell killed in action in 1942 while serving on board HMAS
Canberra. The Mackenzie songs Goldfish, Plucking the Rushes and Fishing
pick up on Mackenzie's and Keats' joint interest in the Chinese style also reflected in
the songs of Peggy Glanville-Hicks and more familiarly in the Li Tai Po settings of Arthur
Bliss and Constant Lambert. In several songs Keats is uncannily predictive of Alan
Hovhaness in the stratospheric altissimo of the songs he wrote and adapted for his wife
Hinako Fujihara. This is not the only pre-echo. The Drinkwater song Moonlit Apples
seems like a style-sketch for Barber's Knoxville (lovingly recorded many years ago
on a Unicorn LP by Australian soprano Molly McGurk).
Neither soloist is ideal. Both can be tremulous of voice especially in
Keats' many high long held notes (try the joyous Spring Breezes) though in
intelligence both more than pass muster. Each sings with response to the meaning of the
words. A good example is Dixon's intonational delineation of the parenthetic aside 'how
long I know not' in We Sat Entwined - which reaches out towards the title song in
Finzi's Till Earth Outwears. Speaking of Finzi, Sun after rain recalls his At
a Lunar Eclipse and Channel Firing.
There are some treasurable songs here including the Hopkins setting of
the famous words "I have decided to go where springs not fail" in Heaven
Haven.
A lovely rather old-fashioned collection topped off by a highly
detailed and consummately well designed English-only booklet running to 32 pages.
Rob Barnett
Horace Keats' settings are
"the most individual contribution to Australian music I have ever heard."
Dr Edgar Bainton, State
Conservatorium of Music, Sydney.
"The music expressed the
nuance and inflections of fine poetry. How Old is My Heart and The Point of Noon appealed
to me as really individual compositions. ... the cycle on the whole suggested a warm
feeling for words and music."
Neville Cardus, Music Critic,
Sydney Morning Herald 1940.
"The settings, restored
Brennan to me ... the music more revelational than the words - or nature, the music opened
the meaning of the words ... opened our mind to receive it ... Positively you have become
responsible for the apotheosis of a great poet."
Hugh McCrae, poet.
"So Mr Keats has
(literally) struck a note which, I believe, must go on sounding, if we are to survive as a
nation. These songs are a cry from the heart of sane mankind against all that's
wrong."
Kenneth MacKenzie, poet.
In contrast to the "coy
warbling that degrades so much of Australian song-writing of the last fifty years: Horace
Keats ... had a touch in song-writing of a distinctly finer order ... "
Roger Covell, Australia's Music 1967.
 [824kb]
The composer's setting of
Lord Byron's poem,
She Walks in Beauty.
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