Kitty Whately - Horizons - French Melodies - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

English mezzo-soprano Kitty Whately presents an album of songs by Madeleine Dring. Born in 1923 to a theatrical family, Dring was admitted to the Royal College of Music at the age of nine. She went on to study composition with Herbert Howells, also taking lessons from Gordon Jacob and Ralph Vaughan Williams. She made her career in the theatre, earning a reputation for being able to create catchy numbers at short notice. Sadly, she died at the early age of fifty-three, of a brain aneurysm. The disparate nature of her musical legacy is often attributed to the piecemeal nature of her career; consequently, resurgence of interest in her work has lagged behind that of her contemporaries Elizabeth Lutyens, Elizabeth Maconchy, Grace Williams, and Ruth Gipps. Kitty Whately and Julius Drake have chosen widely from among her output, and end with Dring's version of Cole Porter's 'In the Still of the Night'.

Joe Derrane - Return to Inis Mor [COMPACT DISCS] date 02/20/1996

Mezzo-soprano Kitty Whately trained at Chetham's School of Music, the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and the International Opera School of the Royal College of Music. Having won both the Kathleen Ferrier Award and Royal Overseas League Award in the same year, she attended the prestigious Academy of the Verbier Festival. She writes of this project 'It has been my great pleasure to record with Joseph once again. We have long shared a mutual passion for early-twentieth-century-romantic Lieder and talked of making a disc including songs by Mahler and Strauss. The opportunity to discover and research lesser-known composers from their era has been thrilling and fascinating. As the world endured the pandemic, we all experienced fear and danger and loss in a way that most of our generation never did before, on such a global scale. Joseph and I felt drawn to reflect on grief, mortality, and bereavement.' The two lesser-known composers featured in the recording are Johanna Müller-Hermann (who studied with several of the most prominent teachers in Vienna - Josef Labor, Guido Adler, Alexander Zemlinsky, Josef Bohuslav Foerster, Franz Schmidt) and Margarete Schweikert, who's upbringing and life in Karlsruhe and studies with Joseph Haas in Stuttgart could hardly provide a greater contrast - clearly audible in their music.