Kitty Whately and Julius Drake Illuminate Madeleine Dring's Overlooked Genius
A captivating new album titled Through the Centuries: Songs of Madeleine Dring has emerged as a powerful testament to the artistry of British composer Madeleine Dring. Performed by mezzo-soprano Kitty Whately and pianist Julius Drake, this collection challenges long-held assumptions about Dring's place in classical music history.
The Life and Legacy of Madeleine Dring
Born in 1923, Madeleine Dring received her musical education at the prestigious Royal College of Music, where she studied under notable figures including Herbert Howells and Ralph Vaughan Williams. Her career path was anything but conventional, encompassing theatre, pantomime, and cabaret performances. Tragically, her life was cut short at age 53 by a brain aneurysm, leaving behind a body of work that remained largely unpublished until the late 1990s.
This delayed publication timeline, combined with Dring's reputation as a musical maverick, threatened to consign her compositions to obscurity. The new album from Whately and Drake represents a significant corrective to this historical oversight.
A Revelatory Musical Partnership
Kitty Whately's warm, supple mezzo-soprano voice proves perfectly suited to Dring's emotionally charged compositions. Her impeccable diction and profound connection to the text create an immersive experience that draws listeners into what can only be described as an intoxicating world of rediscovered musical dramas.
Julius Drake demonstrates remarkable sensitivity at the piano, knowing precisely when to let the instrument take center stage and when to provide more restrained, supportive accompaniment. This musical partnership reveals Dring's sophisticated approach to word-setting, which proves equally effective whether working with Shakespearean texts or poems from her own contemporaries.
The Range and Depth of Dring's Compositional Voice
The album showcases remarkable variety within Dring's oeuvre. Love Is a Sickness pulses with unconsummated passion, while Echoes features bluesy, melismatic lines that demonstrate her versatility. The collection also includes lighter moments, such as the tongue-in-cheek Encouragements to a Lover and her playful setting of Shakespeare's The Cuckoo.
Particularly noteworthy is Dring's ability to breathe new life into familiar material, as evidenced by her fresh interpretation of the traditional It Was a Lover and His Lass. The album concludes with a delightful encore: Dring's arrangement of Cole Porter's In the Still of the Night, described in the review as "as welcome and as piquant as an olive in a dry martini."
A Long-Overdue Reassessment
This comprehensive survey of Dring's song repertoire makes a compelling case for her recognition as a serious composer worthy of contemporary attention. By drawing on poets ranging from Shakespeare and his Elizabethan contemporaries to modern writers, Dring demonstrated both her literary sophistication and her melodic inventiveness.
The album serves as both a rediscovery and a reevaluation, offering listeners the opportunity to experience Dring's work through the exceptional interpretive skills of Whately and Drake. Their performance not only honors Dring's memory but establishes her as a significant figure in twentieth-century British music whose fresh assessment is richly deserved.
