On Sunday afternoon the most recent recipient of the prestigious Kathleen Ferrier Award, Kitty Whately, was welcomed to the Clothworkers’ Hall by Leeds Lieder, an organisation founded in the hope of introducing art song to a new audience. Accompanied by pianist Christopher Glynn, the up-and-coming mezzo soprano performed a varied programme featuring German, French and English songs, delighting the Leeds audience with her beautiful voice and innate understanding of the repertoire.
Whately’s programme began with Schumann’s upbeat ‘Die Kartenlegerin’ (‘The Fortune-teller’), the spirited monologue of a mischievous young girl who waits for her mother to fall asleep before swapping her sewing for fortune cards. Whately is a still performer, but she breathes life into all her characters with her bright vocal tone, exquisite diction and wonderful facial expressions. As she moved on to the composer’s more reflective Frauenliebe und -leben cycle, which she has admired for more than a decade but has never before had the opportunity to perform, she demonstrated her ability to inhabit a very different character. With her pretty voice full of sorrow, she sang of unrequited love and sought the emotional core of these well-known settings of Adelbert von Chamisso’s poems. ‘Süßer Freund, du blickest’ (‘Sweetest friend, you gaze at me’) was a particular highlight.
Whately completed the first half of her programme with Mignon Lieder, four songs by Hugo Wolf. Wolf based this enigmatic cycle on a series of poems by Goethe which originally appeared in the novel Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. Each piece is haunting and dramatic, and the intensity of Whately’s voice built throughout, culminating in extremely robust renditions of Mignon III, ‘So lasst mich scheinen’ (‘Thus let me seem till thus I become’) and ‘Kennst du das Land, wo die Zitronen bluhn?’ (‘Do you know where the lemon trees blossom?’). When interpreting Wolf, her voice seemed transformed: darker in tone, much richer, and many times more powerful. Applause was not immediate, and as her final note hung in the air it seemed as though the incredible emotion she had captured had left us all a little stunned.
She began the second half of her programme with more Goethe: this time settings by Schubert of ‘Gretchen am Spinnarde’ (‘Gretchen at the Spinning Wheel’) and ‘Gretchens Bitte’ (‘Gretchen’s Plea’). Again, Whately captured the dark, contemplative atmosphere of unrequited love beautifully, her voice sorrowful and pretty as it interweaved with the repetitive piano refrains that so accurately represent the motions of the lonely girl’s spinning wheel.