THE idea for what has become BMW Song Circle has the Colette McGahon for a long time. She had it "churning around in my head" in the 1980s, when she was based in Britain, though she didn't encounter much joy bouncing it off colleagues who were what she describes as "wall to wall opera people", not interested in recital work at all.
Back home in Ireland, she finally got the venture up and running in 1994 when, with baritone Paul McNamara and bass baritone Nigel Williams, Song Circle presented Schubert's three song cycles.
The Song Circle is very much repertoire driven. "One of the very strong ideas I had in the beginning was that the recital, both in content and duration, would always be dependent on the music that was chosen," says Colette McGahon. "It wouldn't be the other way around. It was never going to be. `We'll do an evening recital and we'll fill it up any old how,' or `We'll have one decent focal piece and then we'll bump the rest up with a few Irish ditties and a few early songs'. I really wasn't interested in that type of thing. I was interested in something different just specific pieces of music. And if it took an hour to sing them, fine. If it took an hour and a half fine. Or whatever."
THE idea of doing the entire Spanish Songbook, the cycle Hugo Wolf based on German translations of 16th and 17th century Spanish poems, came from the baritone Philip O'Reilly. He had already sung a number of the songs with a mezzo soprano and suggested doing the entire cycle that way (it's usually done by a soprano and a baritone). "I began to think about the Wolf and I realised it was always the same small selection of songs one heard In dem Schatten meiner Locken or Nun wandre, Maria," says Colette McGahon. "When I looked into them, I realised that, barring maybe three or four out of the 44 songs, the rest are all extremely well worth performing. Good texts as well. Interesting, all very different in character. So I thought it would stand up very well over two Sundays, split in half. I thought one sitting might be a little on the tough side."
Although Wolf seems to have had problems with the fact that his reputation was as a miniaturist in the field of song writing, the characterful compression of his work is the feature that seems to have made the greatest impression on Colette McGahon. "I've always been fascinated by how somebody can create such a sound world or colour world in what are always relatively short songs. Wolfs songs never go on. You'd rarely even get three minutes, you know. You get a lot of one and a half or two minute songs, and yet it's an incredible sound world, different from anybody else's. Extraordinary." The particular intensity of Wolfs music is mediated as much through the piano as through the voice, a facet well acknowledged in the choice of Hugh Tinney as the pianist in the forthcoming recitals.
Looking further ahead, Song Circle are planning next year what Colette McGahon calls "the It's not Schubert or Brahms' series", which will bypass their 1997 double celebrations in favour of American music by Leonard Bernstein and Andre Previn. And further ahead, there are plans to invite Irish singers living abroad to give recitals and a proposal to do a series of recitals in Border areas on a peace and reconciliation theme.
