Six Brontë Songs

Some weeks ago we reported the release of a new CD with John Joubert's music. We said:

Some time ago we posted about the works of the British composer John Joubert related with the Brontë sisters. An opera based on Jane Eyre (1997) (Opus 134), a song cycle based on six poems by Emily Brontë (1968, Opus 63) and a Lyric Fantasy based on themes of the opera Jane Eyre (2000, Op. 144). (...)

Next month, Toccata Classics will release John Joubert: Song Cycles that includes Six Poems by Emily Brontë. With Lesley-Jane Rogers (soprano), John Turner (recorder), John McCabe (piano).

The album appears this month and is reviewed on MusicWeb International:

With Toccata CDs you are guaranteed something unusual, new to disc or challenging. Adventure is the key. To this the company couple good documentation, in this case provided by the composer. (...)

The Six Bronte Songs are from the 1960s and again return to Joubert's accustomed landscapes of the mind; nature poetry is not his prime concern. This cycle describes an arc via desolation, bereavement, death to consolation. The steady symphonic pulse in the centre of Oracle is impressively done and the operatic luminosity of the final three lines of the last verse is memorable. After the desolation in Caged Bird comes the defiance of Immortality. However that last song sounds rather like a hoped for desperate consummation rather than a grand blaze of confidence. I wondered whether the climax had actually been achieved in Oracle. There is however no doubting the power of this last song which certainly has an air of high finality about it.

As expected, this majestically confident collection is matched by a booklet that includes the complete texts. (Rob Barnett)

EDIT:

CD Spotlight publishes another review:

Six Poems by Emily Brontë is an earlier work by Joubert, for soprano and piano. Her poems are much as one might expect, not the equal of her prose, but certainly good enough to inspire Joubert, especially in his subtly searing Oracle (though I personally suspect that, were I to ask any 'smiling child' what 'the past is to thee?' one would be extremely unlikely to get the answer, 'An Autumn evening soft and mild/With a wind that sighs mournfully'). Still, such cavils aside, the song Immortality seems to me exactly to express the soul of Emily Brontë in music: her longing for freedom and wildness, her precocious maturity, her inexpressibly dramatic yearning. (Alice McVeigh)

Categories: Emily Brontë, Music, Poetry