The Deeps Have Music is a new record from mezzo Beth Taylor; a Cardiff Singer of the World finalist in 2023, and pianist Hamish Brown. It’s distinctly sea themed with songs predominantly in English with a few French and German numbers for variety.
It starts off with Hamilton Harty’s arrangement of My Lagan Love which is a rather lovely introduction to Taylor’s flexible but generally fairly dark mezzo. She is very versatile though as the next set; Hedwige Chretien’s Petits Poèmes du bord de L’Eau, demonstrates. These six short songs show that Taylor has a considerable palette of colours and moods. There’s some nice precise piano playing from Brown here too.
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The Way Appears is a CD by cellist duo Leah Plave and India Gailey. It consists of seven commissioned pieces by young(ish) Canadian composers who were asked to create pieces in which the two instruments function as equal partners rather than, say, as soloist and continuo. It’s a really varied and interesting collection providing a little over forty minutes of music.
French tenor Cyrille Dubois has collected some of the better known Britten works “en français” for this recording. One normally hears these works performed by English singers in what is pretty much an “official” Britten style so I was intrigued to hear them interpreted by a native French speaker, albeit one with a track record of performing Britten’s operas, song cycles and choral works!
Lili Elbe; music by Tobias Picker, libretto by Aryeh Lev Stollman, is an opera set in the late 1920s. The essence of the plot is the surgical transitioning from male to female of the Danish painter Einar Wegener to become Lili Elbe. It’s the first instance historically of such a transition and it deals, inter alia, with issues of identity and acceptance that still resonate today. 
Intelligence; music by Jake Heggie, libretto by Gene Scheer, is, on the face of it, a spy thriller. We are in Richmond in 1865 and Union forces are closing in on the Southern capital. Elizabeth Van Lew is a wealthy spinster who is spying for the North. She infiltrates her enslaved woman Mary Jane Bowser into the Jefferson Davis household but Mary Jane is not what she appears. She is highly intelligent, literate and has a photographic memory. No-one will think to hide sensitive information from a, presumed illiterate, slave. The relationship between the two women is complex. Mary Jane was born in Elizabeth’s father’s home but was baptised in the white church and educated in the north. She has been told that her mother died in childbirth. But all is not as it seems.
operaramblings 