Don’t you love it when a song recital is so unified with its narrative, that an hour’s worth of song by disparate composers actually sounds like a song-cycle?

This is how Maryam Wocial (soprano) and Audrey Hyland (piano) devised their concert, ‘What the Heart Remembers’, for the 2026 Ryedale Festival. Get the venue just so, in this case the calm interior of tranquil Hovingham’s All Saint’s Church, and magic can be created.

This Waverley Young Artists recital was wonderfully manipulative in its exploration of songs which explore how one remembers aspects of love. Indeed, I have to admit to brushing away a silent tear as we segued from some polished Madeleine Dring songs into Brahms’s tender-hearted Wie Melodien zieht es mir. In addition to Brahms, the big names of song were there, including Purcell, Richard Strauss and Britten.

But a large part of the programme focussed on the lesser-known or downright obscure. Music by Dominick Argento, Liza Lehman, John Duke was unfamiliar to me. Then Hyland told us about the tragic and talented Mel (Mélanie) Bonis, and summarised a story worthy of, she said, a Netflix mini-series (and she wasn’t far wrong). We had a couple of recitations from the artistes, and by the time Wocial walked down the nave with her haunting solo of the folksong She Moved Thro’ the Fair, the audience was completely under her spell.

Obvious with singer and pianist was the astonishing sense of overall unity they achieved in sound and ensemble. Audrey Hyland’s accompanying was a model of sensitivity, matching her tone and colour to what Maryam Wocial was expressing. The latter has a voice which can range from powerful to intimate, from dramatic to understated in moments, with a delicious tonal range. Anyway, all of this for fifteen quid. Can you imagine how much such a recital would cost in the capital?

And I have a further musing on this event. It’s something to do with being immersed in that which is beautiful, even spiritual, which acts as a coat of armour to protect us from our jagged world. I’ll write about this further, perhaps after my Ryedale sojourns, for it’s off to York next for the Gesualdo Six.

The official close of the recital was given over to Dvořák’s Songs My Mother Taught Me, popular for sure, yet never less than poignant. But there was no way the audience would allow these two consummate musicians to finish, and so the sounds of a Roger Quilter song wrapped themselves around the audience. Ah!