Julien van Mellaerts - home and away

Photo credit: Aja Lethaby

New Zealand baritone Julien van Mellaerts has just launched Songs of Travel and Home, a lovely collection of art songs performed with beauty, subtlety, and wit. Van Mellaerts has taken a “quasi-autobiographical” approach to curating this debut album. Now London-based, he grew up in rural New Zealand and his programme also acknowledges his British and French heritage.

Settings by English composers of romantic poetry open the disc, sweet love songs of loss and regret. Van Mellaerts creates a tender atmosphere in Roger Quilter’s Go, lovely rose, the beauty of his light baritone and his effortless rapport with pianist James Baillieu immediately striking. New Zealander Bryony Gibson-Cornish’s dark, soulful viola colours add to the overwhelming melancholy of Frank Bridge’s Three Songs. In Bridge’s setting of Heine’s short Where is it that our soul doth go? van Mellaerts’ singing becomes stronger and more passionate, supported by sensitive piano and lovely viola descant.

Songs of Travel and Home

“…performed with beauty, subtlety, and wit.”

In 2019 van Mellaerts and Baillieu premiered a commissioned song cycle from composer Gareth Farr and poet Bill Manhire in a New Zealand touring programme.  Ornithological Anecdotes offers droll character portraits of our native dotterel, takahē, huia, kiwi and tūī. Van Mellaerts’ flawless diction and witty story-telling combine with Baillieu’s luminous piano in lovingly humorous songs that capture avian quirks. Huia, sung with moving lyricism, provides a ghostly slow movement. Manhire initially rejected our national bird as “spectacularly boring”, but Kiwi, added for a Wigmore Hall recital, is perhaps the most cleverly entertaining of the set. Manhire pokes gentle fun at our national character while Farr invokes Gilbert and Sullivan - “I am a humble bird/ my word my word my word.”

For Ravel’s Chansons madécasses (Madagascan songs) flutist Sofia Castillo and cellist Raphael Wallfisch join the ensemble. English restraint and Kiwi humour give way to lush French sensuality and exotic descriptive expression. Van Mellaerts finds the essence of Ravel’s languorous simplicity and the anti-imperialist Aoua! is sung with full-voiced urgent passion. 

The album ends with a forthright, thrilling performance of Vaughan Williams’ popular setting of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Songs of Travel. Van Mellaerts tells these tales with character and colour, enhanced by elastic piano accompaniment from Baillieu.

Songs of Travel and Home Julien van Mellaerts (baritone) James Baillieu (piano) Bryony Gibson-Cornish (viola) Sofia Castillo (flute) Raphael Wallfisch (cello) (Champs Hill Records)

This review was first published in the NZ Listener issue 2 October 2021