This month: CHRISTOPHER GLYNN Pianist
REWIND
MY FINEST MOMENT
Schubert in English, Vol. 4
Roderick Williams (baritone), Rowan Pierce (soprano), Christopher Glynn (piano) Signum Classics SIGCD770 (2023)
The Schubert in English series is a project I set up to present Schubert’s songs in English, which hadn’t been done before, or at least not for a long time. It was really about finding new audiences for lieder, because I’m very aware that only a small sub-set of the classical music audience goes to song recitals, which is quite a sad thing. So I commissioned Jeremy Sams to create translations of The Winter Journey and other Schubert song cycles and started experimenting with performing them – and this series with Signum came out of it.
Volume four is a miscellany – lots of very storytelling songs like ‘The Trout’ and ‘The Wanderer’ – with two wonderful singers: Roderick Williams, whose way with the English language is second to none, and Rowan Pierce. I had a hunch Rowan would be a wonderful Schubert singer and I think that turned out to be the case.
We had a great time, and I think of all the recordings I’ve made this is the only time that the first edit came through and I thought it was exactly what we were trying to do. It had a naturalness to it that felt precisely what we were aiming for, so I was really pleased with how it came out. That naturalness and directness feel such a big part of Schubert.
MY FONDEST MEMORY
Mozart Violin Sonata Fragments (completed by Tim Jones)
Rachel Podger (violin), Christopher Glynn (piano) Channel Classics CCSSA42721 (2021)
This recording nearly didn’t happen because it was scheduled just as Covid hit, and I think we rescheduled it about four times. We ended up recording it in the middle of the second or third lockdown.
It was completions of fragments of Mozart violin sonatas that Tim Jones made, and it was just fascinating because he would take 16 unfinished bars of Mozart and make not only one completion but multiple completions, and we chose two of each one to record. He tried to work like Mozart worked: very fast, very spontaneously, not giving himself too much time to revise. I wanted to bring that spontaneity into the performance, and in the end we really had no choice because it was virtually impossible to rehearse them.
