Review of concert in the Holywell Music Room on 29th April 2005

Reviewed in the Oxford Times 6th May 2005

The Guildhall School has a well-deserved reputation for its post-graduate work with both singers and pianists; Friday's accomplished recital by soprano Margaret Cooper with pianist Alison Luz provided a good example.

Cooper has a powerful voice - so much so that I wondered at times if she has yet seriously considered the Wagnerian roles. She also has an innately operatic presentation, at times at odds with the intimacy of Lieder, especially in such small-scale surroundings as the Holywell Music Room. Brahms' Zigeunerlieder (Gypsy songs), which we also heard during the Oxford Lieder Festival in its more familiar quartet version, was a good choice for her in the passionate, dramatic numbers such as Hochgeturmte Rimaflut or Brauner Bursche, but she missed the tongue-in-cheek Hungarian feeling in songs like Lieber Gott, du weisst. The wonderful Kommt der manchmal, however, was the best song of the evening, the voice miraculously scaled-down, and deeply moving on Tausch mich nicht, verlass mich nicht (Deceive me not, leave me not).

(The pianist Alison Luz) seemed transformed in the Spanish songs (I see she had a Spanish childhood), playing the often very difficult de Falla accompaniments, in particular, with really idiomatic rhythmic Schwung. Margaret Cooper also seemed much more at home with Spanish gypsies that Austro-Hungarian ones; she encompassed splendidly all the contrasted moods in de Falla's Seven Spanish Songs from the wild Seguidilla Murciana to the bitchy Jota and the ravishing, almost Schumannesque lullaby Nana, in which she at last revealed a truly beautiful mezza-voce.

This she sustained in one of Granados's finest songs, El mirar de la Maja. But in the final Obradors song she suddenly released the harsh, harrowing sound of true Flamenco - excellent.