Opera North’s series of one-hour lunch-time concerts at Dewsbury Town Hall, with many audiences members still seated at the tables where they have just eaten, may be informal, but they are anything but perfunctory. Love Songs was a cleverly balanced programme (curated by David Cowan?) in which the songs of Robert Schumann’s Dichterliede (a Poet’s Love) for baritone were interleaved with songs by other composers, expressing the female point of view – in other words “Around Dichterliede“.
Most of the additional songs belonged to the German “Lied” tradition, the most obvious exception being Paolo Tosti’s Pour un baiser where the romanticism of the German tradition is giving way to sentimentality. The best known of the additional songs was Edvard Grieg’s Solveig’s Song, sung beautifully by Aimee Fisk. A single song by Clara Schumann seemed to fit perfectly into her husband’s scheme for the sequence and the contrasts between Fisk’s soprano and Andrew Randall’s baritone pointed up the emotional content of Schumann’s cycle.
Unfortunately there are one or two errors in the programme, with Schumann’s songs attributed to others, but the effect of some twenty mostly short songs performed continuously (no applause till the end) was undoubtedly moving. Even though we had only a one-sentence summary of each song, the emotional journey was clear.
Fisk’s bright voice, with its powerful upper register, shone in her last two songs, Grieg’s Ein Traum and Schumann’s Mit Myrten und Rosen, but the greater range of emotion belonged to Randall, coolly assured in Im wunderschonen Monat Mai, gloriously solemn in Im Rhein, suppressing bitterness in Ich grolle nicht, ethereal in tone in Ich hab’ im Traum geweinet and, finally, fading into melancholy in Die alten, bosen Lieder.
This last, the final song in Dichterliede, ended with an extended piano section, played by David Cowan with immaculate control. His piano accompaniment, restrained, dramatic, occasionally boisterous, always sensitive, was one of the joys of a concert that brought Schumann’s lieder into sharp relief.
Reviewed on 28 January 2026
