Scottish soprano Lisa Milne is one of the most sought-after lyric sopranos on the operatic stage. But her musical and dramatic gifts are also superbly suited to lieder, as her recital with Malcolm Martineau proved. She transformed the Queen's Hall into a Parisian salon in a selection of chansons by the Venezuelan-born French composer, Reynaldo Hahn. The simplicity of Hahn's settings of Verlaine and Hugo disguised their expressive richness. The whirling, repeated figure in the accompaniment of Verlaine's Fêtes Galantes depicted the serenading lovers of the poem.
Milne's delicate phrasing matched the music's artfulness. Hugo's Si Mes Vers Avaient Des Ailes took flight with Martineau's rippling piano accompaniment and Milne's sensuous vocal line. Even more charming than these rarely heard songs was Richard Rodney Bennett's A Garland for Marjory Fleming. Fleming's naive and sentimental poems - she died in 1803 when she was eight years old - are populated by Christmas turkeys, pet monkeys, and her best friend and cousin, Isabella.
Milne never imposed an inappropriate artifice on these unassuming songs. The sincerity of her Melancholy Lay for the turkeys was movingly communicative, and her righteous indignation in Jessy Watson's Elopement was an object lesson in musical and comic timing. But she revealed the full range of her singing in two cycles by Debussy and Richard Strauss. Debussy's Ariettes Oubliées sets six Verlaine poems, and is a vivid depiction of erotic and emotional infatuation. Milne created a volatile psychological world, veering from the languid first song to the devastating climax of the final number, Spleen. Her "hélas" was a shattering cry; its aftershock the quiet, tolling chords of Martineau's piano postlude.
Strauss's Drei Lieder der Ophelia were equally convincing. These three songs are some of the most spare and expressionist he ever wrote, and they lurch from one emotional extreme to another within almost every verse. Milne's Ophelia was a sorrowing, lost soul, the desperate victim of infidelity in the second song, and the grieving schizophrenic of the third song. She and Martineau formed a symbiotic musical partnership in these harrowing settings.