Mary Queen of Scots continues to exert her fascination on artists everywhere. Two of the latest to fall for her are the composer Brett Dean and writer and director Matthew Jocelyn, whose song cycle based on Mary’s letters, Madame ma bonne soeur, was premiered in 2021 by the Armida Quartet and the mezzo-soprano Lotte Betts-Dean, the composer’s daughter. Mary’s story is a bit of an obsession for Dean recently – he’s reportedly writing a new opera for Munich’s Bayerische Staatsoper on the subject – and now he has made a brand new arrangement of Schumann’s Gedichte der Königin Maria Stuart, for the same line-up. In this recital the two works were heard together, framing a white-hot performance by the Armidas of another work inspired by letters, Janáček’s String Quartet No 2.
Expanding the piano accompaniments for string quartet brings out the dramatic potential of Schumann’s songs – and Betts-Dean, dressed and coiffed as if in a nod to 16th-century portraiture, amplified this in her typically charismatic performance. The five songs trace Mary’s life through settings of her many surviving letters. In Dean’s arrangement of the first, the undulating piano figures are translated into string lines that here evoked the busy scratch of quill on paper. For her final Prayer the string sound could almost have been mistaken for an organ, sanctified yet ominous.
The Janáček – its warmth punctured by glassy, faraway effects and violent bursts of static – was the perfect bridge between this and Dean’s own settings of Mary’s words as compiled by Jocelyn, this time including lines in both English and French. Again, Dean mines the dramatic potential of the situations the texts represent, as much as the words themselves: we hear the rhythmic urgency of messengers on horseback, or the low, steady voice of a confident ruler, drifting higher into the tone Mary will use to plead with and berate her “dear sister”, Elizabeth I. There are sudden, impactful silences, and moments when the string players make vocalisations that are mere disturbances in the air, creating disembodied effects. The final song, quoting from the will Mary wrote on the morning of her execution, is almost entirely spoken against tiny sustained string chords: hope ebbs away, but there’s a final gesture of defiance. It’s an absorbing new work – and now, with the Schumann, it has its perfect companion piece.