“rhapsodic…almost mystical”
Robert Hugill, Planet Hugill
Jess Dandy is an award-winning interpreter of Art Song. Having studied French & German poetry at university, along with a misspent youth at the piano, she finds a natural habitat in the intimacy, nuance, and scope demanded by the recital platform. She enjoys working with a range of pianists, including Martin Roscoe, Malcolm Martineau, Christopher Glynn, Julius Drake, Dylan Perez, Ian Tindale, Gary Matthewman, and James Baillieu.
Jess made her liederabend debut at London’s Wigmore Hall this July to critical acclaim with her duo partner Martin Roscoe, with whom she shares a love of Schubert & hillwalking. Fellow Cumbrians, they devised ‘A Cumbrian Idyll’ for Oxford Lieder Festival 2021 with award-winning author James Rebanks and presenter Gavin Plumley, deconstructing the ventriloquising trope of the English Pastoral in music & literature; offering up a new, earth-bound and inclusive way of making art inspired by landscape, with new compositions by Ella Jarman-Pinto & Joel Rust.
They also created a ‘Lake District Songbook’ for the Ulverston International Music Festival 2019, weaving a tapestry of unlikely confluences between German Romanticism, Alfred Wainwright, Maurice Ravel, and Beatrix Potter, as well as a recital evening inspired by John Ruskin at his iconic Brantwood Home overlooking Lake Coniston. After a well-received appearance at Leeds Lieder Festival, the season 2022/23 sees Jess & Martin return to Brantwood for a celebration of Vaughan Williams, as well as a full evening recital including songs by Richard Strauss and Amy Beach for Manchester Chamber Concert Society at the Stoller Hall. For Furness Classical Music Festival, they will be reprising ‘Let the Earth Open – a sequence of song for Advent’ in Jess’s hometown of Barrow-in-Furness in December.
Photography: Two Moors Festival
BBC Radio 3 Lunchtime Concert
Jess Dandy and Malcolm Martineau perform songs depicting 16th-century life.
“We don’t often see sultry come-to-bed moves in the Wigmore Hall, that chaste Parthenon of refined musical taste. But when Jess Dandy stretched out languidly on stage while offering to show Nicky Spence “how the gypsies sleep”, the temperature shot up even in an empty auditorium. In her numbers, Dandy matched him [Spence] for big-flavoured intensity, a proper diva more than a flirty minx, with her shame-free invitation to cross the ethnic lines: “Sit here closer to me… Or does my complexion alarm you?” Critics should never complain that voices are just too strong.”
Boyd Tonkin, The Arts Desk
Photography: Tall Wall Media
As well as embracing the crystalline form of art song, Jess revels in works destined to burst their own banks. Nowhere more so than in Janácek’s ‘The Diary of One Who Disappeared’ in the role of ‘Zefka’ with tenor Nicky Spence and pianist Julius Drake, broadcast live on BBC Radio 3 from the Wigmore Hall in November 2020. Jess will enjoy her third performance of this piece with Nicky Spence next year as part of York Concerts Spring season, this time with previous collaborator Christopher Glynn at the piano. The second performance took place in November 2021 with pianist Dylan Perez at the Two Moors Festival, where Jess presents a programme of Brahms, Clara & Robert Schumann this October with pianist James Baillieu and violist Ann Beilby.
Jess’s musical partnership with pianist Malcolm Martineau saw them make national headlines, becoming the first musicians to give a live performance with an audience in Scotland following COVID-19 restrictions in May 2021. Their programme, ‘Shall I strive with words to move?’, broadcast live on BBC Radio 3, followed the thread of the extraordinary sixteenth century, charting its lasting and far-reaching musical influence in works by Dowland, Ravel, Poulenc, Gounod, Berlioz, Schumann, Argento, Horovitz, and Korngold. Jess rejoined Malcolm this summer for her recital debut at The Edinburgh International Festival: Brahms Liebeslieder Walzer with pianist Stephen Osborne and singers Madison Nonoa, Magnus Walker, and William Thomas.
Jess won the Oxford Lieder Festival Young Artist Platform in 2018 with her long-term duo partner, Dylan Perez. They are now both regular performers at the festival. Her contributions to Perez’s recording of The Complete Songs of Samuel Barber (Resonus Classics, Times Album of the Week) were reviewed as ‘especially ravishing’ (Presto Classical). They are delighted to be part of the Marylebone Theatre’s inaugural season with a recital in January 2023.
Jess sees Art Song as a living tradition and encourages new contributions to the repertoire: most recently, she premiered ‘Four Songs of Emily Brontë’ by Brian Elias with violist Timothy Ridout at Leicester International Music Festival.
With this in mind, Jess and Dylan are currently developing an EP exploring the Four Serious Songs of Johannes Brahms, examining what it means to record music ‘of the canon’ today. They will open the bulletproof display cabinet and encourage fresh, democratic and diverse responses to this mainstay of the recital repertoire with the newly formed Music & Being Collective: sound engineer Bobby Williams, photographer Clare Park, movement practitioner Debbie Green, and composer Alex Mills.
Samuel Barber The Complete Songs
Classical Album of the Week The Sunday Times
“Barber's final published songs, Three Songs, Op. 45 were written in 1972 for Dietrich Fischer Dieskau, who evidently loved them but was prevent from performing them by illness. Jess Dandy sings them with intense, focused tone which seems to emphasise the bleakness of the music. Less expressionistly hard edged then Despite and Still, there is an austerity to these and an intense melancholy, even in the more decorative second song.”
Robert Hugill, Planet Hugill
Leeds Lieder
Jess Dandy, contralto | Martin Roscoe, Piano
Lieder
Mélodie / Spanish song
Jess Dandy & Dylan Perez Tchaikovsky
The Bride’s Lament
Holywell music room.
Sound Engineer: Bobby Williams, 2018.
English / American Song
ASKONAS HOLT INTERVIEW
‘Who is your vocal idol?’
“I have so many – it is very difficult to single out anyone in particular. I think, in terms of becoming more attuned to my body and embracing its power as an instrument, hearing Shirley Verrett sing “O Don fatale” for the first time was pivotal…”