REVIEWS
"A sizeable audience welcomed Angela Rowley and Anna Le Hair back to the Fringe - their third year - with varied programme of songs from Handel through to Gershwin taking in Wagner and Vaughan Williams.
Angela has a beautiful voice and is wonderfully supported by her talented accompanist Anna. The programme showed their skills to great advantage particularly the Bachianas brasilieras by Villa Lobos with its almost equal demands on both singer and pianist and in the main work of the evening - Knoxville: Summer of 1915 by Samuel Barber. This is a setting of a short piece of prose by James Agee about childhood in Tennessee. Angela had thoughtfully provided copies of Agee's text to enable us to appreciate in full the clever relationship of Barber's haunting American voice to the incomprehensible nature of adult behaviour as seen by a young child.
Other
highlights included Les Filles de Cadix by Delibes and an excerpt from
Charpentier's opera Louise reminding us of its skilful composition and the
dramatic qualities of this almost forgotten work. The evening concluded with
Max Reger's charming "The quiet of then wood", a calm end to a delightful
programme made even better by the strawberries and cream in the interval."
Buxton Fringe
2006
"Taken from Sondheim's legendary 'Send in the Clowns', 'Isn't It Rich' is the
title of soprano Angela Rowley's concert, held at the Methodist Church on 19
July. Her repertoire ranged from show tunes to operatic arias, from German
lieder to modern settings of poems, displaying an admirable versatility.
Ms Rowley's pleasing voice showed tremendous versatility in tackling whichever
genre the programme dictated, although she seemed particularly sympathetic to
the lieder. With expressive features and precise body language, she conveyed the
meaning of each song, while her crystal-clear enunciation more than made up for
the occasionally echoey acoustics of the venue. I was pleased that she didn't
over-emote the songs, even one as potentially sentimental as Amanda McBroome's
'The Rose', instead conveying its emotion with great simplicity.
Special note should also be made Anna le Hair's sensitive and meticulous
accompaniment, never more so than on Benjamin Britten's setting of WH Auden's
'Fish in the Unruffled Lakes', where accompanist and soloist both seemed to
carry on their (fiendishly difficult) parts independently of each other, but
still created a beautifully melodic sound in the process.
Angela Rowley was pleasingly clear and succinct in her introductions, explaining
each item with humour and clarity, in a programme which contained something for
everyone."
Robbie Carnegie, Buxton Festival Fringe 2005
.
.Angela epitomised everything I had hoped for in that concert..."