
Poems for a World Gone to Sh*t was published in 2018. The short anthology has no credited editor and urges its reader to “discover the amazing power of poetry to make even the most f*cked up times feel better”. The poems themselves are mostly well-known, short and by 20th-century and contemporary writers: the attention-grabbing, gifting-ready packaging ultimately contains what it might call the “same old sh*t”.
Perhaps baritone James Newby and pianist Joseph Middleton imagined that taking this collection as the basis for a song recital would bring new audiences to art song. If so, the half-empty auditorium at Kings Place for this final concert in its Platoon Presents series wasn’t encouraging. Or perhaps the collection’s narrative arc from fury and frustration via calls for action to a recognition of life’s wonders seemed ripe for exploration in song. In that case, it was a shame that the logic for matching songs and poems from the collection – the latter read by Bridgerton star Adjoa Andoh – relied mainly on pivoting between key words rather than mood or meaning. Thus Maya Angelou’s Still I rise (its anthemic power blistering in Andoh’s performance) was followed by Herbert Howells’ song King David: its Walter de la Mare text is galaxies away from Angelou’s poem, but there’s a lovely key change on the phrase “He rose”.
The result was a programme dominated by art-song favourites, enlivened by a few less obvious choices. In Schubert’s Totengräbers Heimweh, Newby ranged between full-throttle fury and wide-eyed whispering, while Strauss’s Ruhe, Meine Seele featured almost no vibrato, his baritone chilled and chilling. Elsewhere there was boyish charm in Schubert’s Hoffnung and a showcase for Newby’s exquisitely lucid upper register in Percy Grainger’s Willow, Willow. Middleton’s playing travelled still further, from a touch so delicate you might forget that pianos have hammers to vicious, nasty clanging in Hanns Eisler’s Der Sohn 1. Yet alongside Andoh’s shape-shifting delivery of poems by Larkin and Dickinson, Lear and McNish, the absence of texts or translations or even names of poets for the songs exacerbated the impression that these musical performances – excellent in other ways – simply had less to say.
