Gavin Friday with the Gavin Bryars ensemble, performing Friday’s setting of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 40 at Purcell Rooms, London on July 4, 2009. Audience shot video.

Sonnet 40 – Lyrics

Take all my loves, my love, yea, take them all;
What hast thou then more than thou hadst before?
No love, my love, that thou mayst true love call;
All mine was thine before thou hadst this more.
Then if for my love thou my love receivest,
I cannot blame thee for my love thou usest;
But yet be blamed, if thou thyself deceivest
By wilful taste of what thyself refusest.
I do forgive thy robbery, gentle thief,
Although thou steal thee all my poverty;
And yet, love knows, it is a greater grief
To bear love’s wrong than hate’s known injury.
Lascivious grace, in whom all ill well shows,
Kill me with spites; yet we must not be foes.

Text by William Shakespeare, music by Gavin Friday and Herb Macken

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“But the most charismatic moment occurs when Friday stalks on in gold jewellery and inch-high brothel-creepers to intone Sonnet 40 like a diabolical lounge entertainer.”

Lynne Walker for The Independent:

“The most extraordinary setting, however, is Gavin Friday’s take on No 40, which he intones in a kind of strangulated speech-song. While his words are often inaudible, as a piece of performance theatre it is astonishing. He swerves between Caliban and Puck and several characters in between so compellingly…”

Terry Grimley reviews Nothing like the Sun for the Birmingham Post:

Gavin Friday, who sang his own setting, scored a point by dragging Shakespeare into a pop idiom, turning the final couplet into a classic fade-out.

Read the full review.

The Bardathon blog writes:

The fourth sonnet was set by one of the chief attractions (for me) of the event- Gavin Friday, who performed the sonnet himself. Friday is an old-school friend of Bono and the rest of U2, and has performed with them on and off over the last 25 years, as well as producing his own work including a spectacular reinterpretation of ‘Peter and the Wolf’. He turned Sonnet 40 into a moody lounge number, half-singing, half-speaking the words until he reached the final couplet, for which he transferred to a falsetto as he sung over and over “Kill me with spites, kill me with spites” as he walked off the stage and the music faded away. Writing about music is something I find nearly impossible, but it made everything in me tingle.

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Thirteen sonnets scarcely represent Shakespeare’s 154 poems in a Complete Works season but Nothing Like the Sun is at least a nod in the right direction. Opera North and the Royal Shakespeare Company invited Gavin Bryars to curate an evening of musical settings, the centrepiece of which is his own sequence of eight sonnets for soprano, tenor, speaker and ensemble. The first half is made up of music by five musicians, each preceded by a slightly self-conscious and not always convincing reading of their sonnet. With the intrepid James Holmes as keyboard player/conductor, however, the music hangs together better than the words.

Five diverse musical voices and a lack of narrative focus prevents any sense of flow in the first half, though not without some original expression of Shakespeare’s words. Natalie Merchant makes an evocative stab at Sonnet 73, while Mira Calix adds rustling leaves and other scrunchy natural sounds to the quirky No 130. No one chooses the sonnets allied to political events or the ones that speak about sex (No 20) or introduce an explicit erotic element (No 151), and even Nico Muhly and Antony Hegarty avoid playing with gender roles by plumping for “Weary with toil, I haste me to my bed”, conjuring an image of elusive sleep with wandering cello and tinkling piano.

Alexander Balanescu’sNyman-like textures, almost Bachian at times, wrap themselves seductively around No 43, “When most I wink”, Anna Maria Friman’s ethereal soprano tones circling above the instrumental world like a halo. Cruelly written for tenor, it leaves John Potter sounding a little vulnerable.

The most extraordinary setting, however, is Gavin Friday’s take on No 40, which he intones in a kind of strangulated speech-song. While his words are often inaudible, as a piece of performance theatre it is astonishing. He swerves between Caliban and Puck and several characters in between so compellingly that Bryars’ music pales into an atmospheric blur. Piano and cimbalom evoke the antique sound of the virginals mentioned in No 128, while the nightingale of No 102 sings high on bright clarinet. His last setting, No 64, finally brings all the performers together, but it’s a long time coming.

By Lynne Walker

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