George Shirley-Quirk: Advent Calendar of Song: The Third Day of Christmas
A Calendar of Song: The Third Day of Christmas
Yesterday I wrote of voices that felt sexually exciting. Today let’s turn to music and singing that shows the other side of passion: what Arlene Croce, writing fifty years ago about Balanchine’s Liebeslieder Waltzer, superbly called “erotic affliction”. My mind turns first to each of the three acts of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. Instead, however, I give you the English sea-shanty “Shallow Brown”, collected in 1908 by the sailor-singer John Perring, and arranged by Percy Grainger in 1910.
Perring never knew why the object of love was called “Shallow” (though pronounced “Shaller”); he felt the song must be a woman’s voice calling to the sailor she loved as his ship departed. Grainger, however, felt that sea-shanties are almost exclusively for male singing on board of a ship; and he then made this highly dramatic arrangement of it. You can hear the male soloist as the voice of homosexual desire; you can hear the whole situation as one man and his male ship companions recalling - embodying - the call of the woman he left behind; or you can imagine him and them as the voices on the great ghost ship of erotic yearning and anguish.
It’s a thoroughly original setting. I was first introduced to it in the 1990s by the choreographer Matthew Bourne, who had choreographed it in his early work Town and Country; he’d listened to several recordings, but recognised that this, conducted by Benjamin Britten, was the best. (I’ll say now that Britten often strikes me as the greatest performing musician - conductor, pianist, accompanist - of the second half of the twentieth century. That superb all-round conductor Charles Mackerras, although he fell foul of Britten after making what sounded like a tactlessly homophobic joke, never failed to say that Britten was the greatest musician he had ever encountered. I never heard Britten live; but there are Mozart concerti where his conducting makes me feel I’m in Mozart’s head as with nobody else, and in Schubert’s Winterreise his pianism has the same effect.)
John Shirley-Quirk (1931-2014) - heterosexual, in case you’re curious - was an English bass-baritone whose repertory ranged from Handel to Henze; he remains impressive in music ranging from The Messiah to a multiple-character agent in Britten’s final opera, Death in Venice. I find his voice odd, seemingly unlovely and constrained, but oddly - hauntingly - eloquent. It seems unduly “covered”, repressed, bottled-up - until you notice that every fibre in his face and body seems to contribute to vocal/verbal expression.
Here you go: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wXj7qkQ4uLY
Shallow Brown, you're going to leave me
Shallow, Shallow Brown
Shallow Brown, you're going to leave me
Shallow, Shallow Brown
Shallow Brown, don’t dare deceive me
Shallow, Shallow Brown
Shallow Brown, don't ever deceive me
Shallow, Shallow Brown
You're going away across the ocean
Shallow, Shallow Brown
You're going away across the ocean
Shallow, Shallow Brown
You'll ever be my heart's devotion
Shallow, Shallow Brown
You'll ever be my heart's devotion
Shallow, Shallow Brown
For your return my heart is burning
Shallow, Shallow Brown
For your return my heart is burning
Shallow, Shallow Brown
Shallow Brown, you're going to leave me
Shallow, Shallow Brown
Shallow Brown, don’t dare deceive me
Shallow, Shallow Brown
Shirley-Quirk has plenty of bel canto virtues: notably the crescendo and diminuendo of messa di voce in line after line, mastery of cantilena through the vocal line, and the absolutely fluent four-note flourishes (gruppetti) at 0.29, 1.09, 1.52, 2.33, 3.30, and 4.36.
I’d better add now, simply, that the whole song in this performance often makes me catch my breath, gasp, and truly sob. Yes, reader, I am that ghost ship, that sea-shanty.
