The Earth Child: A Mansfield centenary tribute album
New Zealand composer Janet Jennings chose five of Katherine Mansfield’s poems for her song cycle The Earth Child, revealing and enhancing Mansfield’s striking imagery and wondrous story-telling in beautiful songs full of poetic fantasies and witty tales. The Earth Child was released on an album of the same name last month to mark the centenary of Mansfield’s death in France on 9 January 1923.
The whole album is beautifully performed and a brilliantly curated tribute, including, alongside the Mansfield settings, a song cycle by Frenchman Gabriel Fauré and another by Jennings setting New Zealander Ursula Bethell’s poems. All exude a feminine sensibility both modernist and romantic. Fauré composed his song cycle La chanson d’Ève, using poetry by Belgian symbolist Charles van Lerberghe, in 1910, a year after Mansfield wrote her Earth Child poems. Fauré’s ten enchanting little songs are placed between the Mansfield cycle and Jennings’s Sit Down With Me Awhile, five songs to poetry by Bethell.
Composer Janet Jennings
…her brilliantly curated tribute includes her own settings of Mansfield’s Earth Child poems.
All three cycles use nature, especially gardens and flowers, as metaphors for emotional states. In Fauré’s cycle, Eve comes to life in the Garden of Eden. These beautiful romantic settings exude a perfumed French sensuality, with bittersweet reminiscence, the exquisite sadness of twilight and finally darker colours and gentler passions as death approaches.
Bethell’s poems are descriptive and earthy, her gardener struggling with soil and pests as well as nostalgia and loss. Jennings has used a direct, largely tonal language for these lovely and expressive songs.
Some of Fauré’s dreamy French quality has found its way into Jennings’ The Earth Child settings. While the whole album is a delight, these five opening songs are reason enough to buy the collection. Stories ranging from mischievous and childlike to profound and dramatic are expressed in music marvellously sensitive to Mansfield’s subtle nuances and complex characterisations.
Soprano Natasha Te Rupe-Wilson
…emotional insight and a range of vocal colour.
The performances are exceptional and warmly communicative. Soprano Natasha Te Rupe-Wilson (Te Arawa, Ngā Puhi) sings with emotional insight, using a fine range of vocal colour to create contrasting moods and narratives. Somi Kim’s piano is as responsive to the singer as to the compositions, painting scenes with playing that’s gently lyrical one moment, urgent and passionate the next.
Pianist Somi Kim
…as responsive to the singer as to the compositions.
The Earth Child, a tribute to Katherine Mansfield on the centenary of her death. Song cycles by Janet Jennings and Gabriel Fauré, Natasha Te Rupe-Wilson (soprano), Somi Kim (piano). Available for purchase here.
This album review was first published in NZ Listener issue 25 February, 2023