“Have not poetry and music arisen…..out of the sounds the enchanters made to help their imagination to enchant, to charm, to bind with a spell themselves and the passers by?” (W.B. Yeats). On the 150th birthday of WB Yeats, Christine Tobin leads a celebration in words and music.
Irish singer-songwriter, composer and BBC award winning Jazz Vocalist Christine Tobin’s concert Sailing To Byzantium, brings to life the lyrical magic of poetry in a euphonic and sensitive setting of twelve poems by Irish poet W.B. Yeats. Tobin, having built a reputation for setting poems by Eva Salzman, William Morrris and others was invited by the National Library of Ireland to give a performance as part of their Yeats “Summer’s Wreath” celebrations a few years back. Its success led to Sailing To Byzantium, which debuted at the Southbank during the 2012 London Jazz Festival, and features a stellar line-up: Phil Robson (guitar), Kate Shortt (cello), Liam Noble (piano) and Dave Whitford (double bass).
Christine won a British Composer Award for these beautiful settings. The poems set are chosen from Yeats’ early work through to his final collection. Christine was drawn to the love poems such as “When You Are Old”, written with the unattainable love of his life Maud Gonne, in mind, and also his poems that celebrate the transformative power of art and his desire to find a deeper spiritual truth, as expressed in “Sailing To Byzantium”. She works with the poems on a deep intuitive level creating music that draws you into a world of unalloyed soulfulness, conjuring watercolour accompaniments on “The Fisherman” and a hypnotic, prayer-like refrain on “Sailing To Byzantium”. On the album actor Gabriel Byrne’s reading of “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” over Tobin’s evocative piano accompaniment, bring great warmth and luminosity to the meaning. “In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Constance Markiewicz” captures the spectral quality of friends in a world that has passed. Apocalyptic disquiet is conveyed on “The Second Coming” by a menacing, repetitive 5/4 motif where the “blood dimmed tide is loosed” and culminates in an anarchic crescendo.
“Christine Tobin is as revelatory an interpreter of Yeats as Richard Ellmann or, indeed, Louis MacNeice. She has an uncanny ability to become a vehicle for the text of a poem in a way that would have sent a shiver of recognition through the great man himself. “ poet Paul Muldoon
“Her voice, robust and subtle by turns but characterful throughout, is of course to the fore, but it’s her empathetic arrangements, crafted around each text with the skill of a watchmaker, which make this sonically impeccable disc unique. Do buy this, but also watch out for live dates.” BBC Music Magazine *****
“In this beautiful collection of songs based on the poetry of WB Yeats, vocalist Christine Tobin has created an unqualified masterpiece. Setting poems from across the entire spectrum of Yeats’ oeuvre, Tobin perfectly gauges the emotional and spiritual resonances of the texts, aided by performances of incredible subtlety and understatement. The singer nails her beguilingly pure tone and melodic fecundity to the mast from the get-go in the autumnal opener “When You Are Old”. Jazzwise ****Recommended
