Joseph Middleton

Carolyn Sampson & Joseph Middleton – Album für die Frau (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:11:29 minutes | 1,09 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © BIS

For the first four years of their marriage, Robert and Clara Schumann kept a joint diary, a project which Robert described as “a record of our wishes and our hopes, and the means whereby we may convey to one another any requests we may have to make, for which words may not suffice…”. In the imaginative recital “Album für die Frau”, Carolyn Sampson and Joseph Middleton combine songs by both composers into something similar – the depiction of a relationship seen through the eyes of both parties.

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Carolyn Sampson & Joseph Middleton – A Soprano’s Schubertiade (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:17:32 minutes | 1,23 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © BIS

Ably written around the figure of the woman in Schubert’s Lieder, this new album by Carolyn Sampson and Joseph Middleton uses verse from poets Helmina von Chézy, Marianne von Willemer, or poems with a female protagonist, like Goethe’s Mignon and Gretchen; Ellen in Walter Scott’s Lady of the Lake by Walter Scott, translated into German. The album closes with the mother of mothers, on the famous Ave Maria. Dubbed “the best British soprano of early music by far” by the press in her own country, this English diva has a rare versatility, which allows her to move from the extreme difficulty of Semele (Handel) to Stravinsky’s Noces, by way of Bach, which she sings with outstanding representatives of such different aesthetics as Masaaki Suzuki, Philippe Herreweghe and Riccardo Chailly.

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Carolyn Sampson & Joseph Middleton – The Contrast: English Poetry in Song (2020)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:21:06 minutes | 1,33 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © BIS

Song composition has been a constant in British music since the lute and consort works of the early seventeenth century. By 1900, it had developed into a sophisticated genre embraced by almost all serious composers. The music on this amply-filled disc illustrates the diversity of British song-writing and its transformation over a century: from Vaughan Williams’s Orpheus and his Lute (ca 1901) to HuwWatkins’s Five Larkin Songs, composed in 2010 for Carolyn Sampson, who performs them here. Together with Joseph Middleton, her partner on several acclaimed recital discs, she has devised a highly contrasting programme bookended by two groups of songs by William Walton – A Song for the Lord Mayor’s Table from 1962, celebrating the diversity of London, and three songs from Façade, the ‘entertainment’ with which the young composer gained both fame and notoriety in 1923.These frame settings by Ralph Vaughan Williams, Roger Quilterand Frank Bridge of poetry by writers from Shakespeare and Shelley to Keats and Yeats. In comparison, the anti-romantic poems by Philip Larkin have been described as marked by ‘a very English, glum accuracy’. Huw Watkins (b. 1976) has selected texts from across Larkin’s output, catching the various moods – ranging from a certain unsentimental nostalgia to the poet’s seemingly habitual pessimism – in settings that often carry a bittersweet sting in the tail.

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Carolyn Sampson & Joseph Middleton – Reason in Madness (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:14:50 minutes | 1,14 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © BIS

Throughout history, men have feared madwomen, burning them as witches, confining them in asylums and subjecting them to psychoanalysis – yet, they have also been fascinated, unable to resist fantasizing about them. For their new album, Carolyn Sampson and Joseph Middleton have created a programme that explores the responses of a variety of composers to women whose stories have left them vulnerable and exposed. As a motto they have chosen an aphorism by Nietzsche: ‘There is always some madness in love, but there is also always some reason in madness.’

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