Based on Virginia Woolf’s love of music, written for Sarah Connolly, Fiona Shaw and Julius Drake and commissioned by Wigmore Hall
The first song, ‘The Diary’, presents a passage from an early diary of 1919. Already married to Leonard Woolf, the young writer had suffered a mental breakdown in 1917 but subsequently resumed writing in the journal which she had begun at 15 years-of-age, and Argento’s setting is tentative yet hopeful.
Above a sparse yet gentle accompaniment, Sarah Connolly’s opening tone row, lyrically undulating and repeated throughout the song in the piano texture, instituted a speculative mood, ‘What sort of diary should I like mine to be?’, while Drake’s delicate piano interplay suggested the writer’s internal thoughts.
Connolly used colour to convey different ideas and feelings, the slight pauses between the words ‘solemn’, ‘bright’ and ‘beautiful’ emphasising her fluctuating deliberations. At times, the static vocal line and parlando style of delivery enabled the soprano to evoke Woolf’s serene isolation, but she was ever alert for the more lyrical nuances and arioso gestures, shaping the rising 7th of ‘mysteriously’ – as Woolf contemplates the way that thoughts revisited, though initially unsettling, can strangely cohere – with beautiful delicacy.
Claire Seymour, Opera Today, 22 July 2013
Dr Kate Kennedy 