The Deeps Have Music

The Deeps Have Music is mezzo-soprano Beth Taylor’s debut recording with pianist Hamish Brown, an anthology of song built entirely around the sea in its many moods — calm, stormy, mysterious, and consoling. The program ranges from a Hamilton Harty folk-song arrangement and Hedwige Chrétien’s surrealist Petits Poèmes du Bord de l’Eau through three contrasting Schubert sea-songs, to Alma Mahler-Werfel’s Lobgesang and Ethel Smyth’s Three Moods of the Sea — composed the same year Smyth joined the suffragette movement, two years before a stone-throwing incident landed her in prison. Cameron Biles-Liddell’s The Breakers, a world-premiere recording composed for and dedicated to Taylor and Brown, depicts a violent sea storm and its aftermath, while the album closes with Elgar’s beloved Sea Pictures, Op. 37, heard here in Brown’s own piano adaptation of the composer’s orchestral accompaniment — including “In Haven,” written by Elgar’s wife Alice as a testament to their marriage against her family’s disapproval.

Recorded at the Laidlaw Centre, University of St Andrews, the album brings together rising British talents — Taylor, a 2023 BBC Cardiff Singer of the World finalist, and Brown, an increasingly sought-after collaborative pianist — in a richly varied survey of how composers across a century have heard the sea.

Beth Taylor, mezzo-soprano
Hamish Brown, piano