Monday 8th September 2008, Bristol Evening Post

REVIEW

Anniversary celebration

Concert Matinee: All Saints Church, Clifton

   For the monthly recital in their regular series, Ian Yemm (tenor), a member of Welsh National Opera, with Andrew Wilson-Dickson (piano) presented a programme of songs by French and English composers.

   All Saints is celebrating its 140th anniversary this week and the concert was a suitable eve-of-festival programme.

   Fauré's La Bonne Chanson is based on poems by Paul Verlaine, depicting life through the various seasons.

   Ian took a short time to adjust to the acoustics but in these nine songs there was plenty of scope for him to show the range of his voice. The gentle, expressive White Moon was followed by some exquisite singing and control in the highest register in Before You Disappear. He concluded with the sweeping music of Winter Has Ended.

   The excellent accompanist Andrew Wilson-Dickson played one of Fauré's

Nocturnes to give the soloist a rest.

   Vaughan William's Songs Of Travel uses contrasting poems by R L Stevenson to also express the various feelings of the journey through life. The opening number, The Vagabond, was sung with great gusto and the soloist showed excellent control of the dynamics. The hushed ending of Upward And Downward Slope was particularly impressive.

   The enthusuastic audience was rewarded with an encore - Silent Noon.

Rating: 8/10

John Packwood

Vaughan Williams Celebrated Magnificently at Much Wenlock Festival!

Can there be a better venue than Holy Trinity Church Much Wenlock to hear a performance of Vaughan Williams’s On Wenlock Edge?  Much Wenlock Festival offered its patrons a magical opportunity on Saturday: to take a guided walk around Wenlock Edge in the morning led by local writer and broadcaster Paul Evans, followed in the afternoon by this beautifully lyrical recital.  Locally born tenor Ian Yemm was our soloist and he told his audience that he had spent the previous day on the Edge, soaking up the atmosphere.  Perhaps it was this, complimented by the beautiful acoustic of the church, that enabled him to give such an inspiring performance.

He was well supported by the Bows Quartet, who opened the concert with a little-performed Vaughan Williams work: Three preludes on Welsh hymn tunes.  A large audience paid careful attention to each hymn and the prelude that followed it – a delightful curtain-raiser that whet the appetite for what was to follow.

Then Ian Yemm, with balanced and sensitive accompaniment by Pamela Pickford on piano, performed On this Island – a sequence of poems by W.H. Auden set to music by Benjamin Britten in 1937.  Voice and piano rang through the church beautifully, ranging from a resonant assertiveness to a delicate softness without ever losing the clarity of the language.

And so to our main course, with the Bows Quartet and Pam Pickford coming together to support Ian Yemm’s wonderfully engaging singing of Housman’s poems On Wenlock Edge.  In the wrong context these pieces can sound inconsequential or even quaint.  But not here: our performers brought out the full emotional depth of this highly-charged cycle.

So strong was the audience’s response to the full experience of this lovely occasion that they were rewarded with an encore: accompanied by Pam, Ian sang Vaughan Williams’s beautiful setting of Christina Rossetti’s poem Silent Noon.  It was a delightful conclusion to a truly memorable experience.

Robert Petty

04/07/2008

Making Music Bulletin

Less familiar paths were taken with Delius's evocative part-songs To be sung of a summer night on the river with Ian Yemm, tenor, in fine voice. The central part of the concert was a commanding and yet sensitive performance of Britten's On This Island  by Ian Yemm.

H.E.Elsom

Ian Yemm as Albert sang beautifully, and managed to look dim but just a touch demonic when appropriate.

John Higgins, The Times.

Ian Yemm in the original Peter Pears role is careful not to overplay Albert’s goofiness. Donizetti’s Elisir and Britten’s Herring have much in common and Albert is a Nemorino looking not for the elixir of love but the potion of independence, which arrives in the spiked drink he downs when crowned May King. Yemm is excellent at suggesting the worm about to turn, ever yearning for the fun world beyond boxes of apples and sprouts. His tenor is neat and clean, he is a natural self-depracating comic and his diction is immaculate.

David Blewitt, The Stage.

His subtly observed Albert was delightful, never overplayed.

The Croydon Advertiser.

The tenor Ian Yemm struck exactly the right balance of agility and expressiveness. (Bach Magnificat)