Rosa Mundi

June TaborJune Tabor is a good candidate for putting out an album entirely about roses, or rather an album about what roses are about. She attended Oxford (St. Hugh's College) in the 1960s, appearing on University Challenge (the British equivalent of College Bowl) in 1968 and during a break from her music career she worked as a librarian. Many critics have described her approach as being a path through the no-man's land that lies between the art song and the traditional ballad. On Rosa Mundi (2001) she includes a song by Tchaikovsky called “The Crown of Rose” and the very familiar “Barbry Ellen,” and in this context the final image of that ballad hits with unexpected emotion.

The liner notes are a wealth of information about the symbolic weight of the rose in each song, but the lyrics for the traditional “Rose in June” are very nearly about simply picking actual roses. Below the lyrics Tabor writes:

Of the fourteen Rosa species currently considered to be native to Britain, four are common in the hedgerows – the dog rose (Rosa canina), the field-rose (Rosa arvensis), the harsh downy-rose (Rosa tomentosa) and the sweet-briar (Rosa rubiginosa). The dog-rose is the most abundant and widespread, scrambling through hedges or scaling tall trees, the fragant rose of summer evening walks.

The dog roseOn the page is a photograph of a dog-rose spilling out of a hedge taken by Mark Emerson, who in addition to being the violin and viola player on most of her albums for several years, is Tabor's partner. Somehow that conveys to the attentive (liner note-reading) listener that this is not simply an academic exercise and certainly not just a sentimental journey, but actually an authentic expression of personal passion, a wedding of intellectual interest and sentiment.

Tabor opens the album with a pointedly sentimental song from 1916, “Roses of Picardy,” which was popular among men in the trenches on the Western Front. At age 63 Tabor is old enough to have grown up knowing veterans of the First World War (her grandparents generation). Picardy is a region of northeastern France that includes the whole of the Somme, the site of one of the largest losses of life during warfare in human history.

Tabor's voice has been called cold, cool and autumnal, which makes it perfect for conveying the bone-chilling details of traditional ballads of the British Isles. But for “Roses of Picardy” this somber quality adds gravity to the popular song, making it clear how desperate the words of the song – “and the years roll on forever” – were for soldiers – “and the first song of the roses is the last song that she hears.”
Tabor is neither cool nor removed in the climactic lines of “Deep in Love.”

I put my hand into the bush / thinking the sweetest rose to find /
I pricked my finger to the bone / and left the sweetest love behind.

Her voice swells with something like anger and you believe that she knows whereof she sings. But there is restraint here that prevents her tone from being melodramatic. It is the control that enhances the listener's sense of the expression of feeling.

Les Barker is known for his comic songs, but “Paint Me, Redouté” is an impressionistic account of the fate of the Empress Josephine, Napoleon's first wife, who was dismissed because she was barren. According to Tabor the empress established the first modern rose collection, a garden of 250 different types at Malmaison. Barker has the Martinique-born Josephine say to Belgian painter Pierre-Joseph Redouté: “So paint me, Redouté at Malmaison / young Rose the creole the rose I  became.” She died a year before Napoleon's final defeat at Waterloo. “Some say the Gallica lives too short a life / this rose now faces winter weather ...”

Rosa Mundi (2001)Tabor sings in (Norman) French for “Belle Rose,” a song collected from the Isle of Jersey in the English Channel and in German for “Rhosyn wyn” (the Welsh name for the 15th century German carol “Es ist ein ros' entsprungen”). The rhythm of the refrain of the French song “Qui pendait au rosier blanc belle rose” (“I picked the lovely rose that hung from the white rose bush”) is tricky, having almost too many syllables for the melody and yet Tabor manages it without apparent effort. The line “Und hat ein blümlein bracht” is a perfect iambic trimeter that descends in pitch and plumbs the smokey depths of her voice beautifully.

How many versions of Robert Burns' “My Love's Like the Red, Red Rose” have you heard? Too often Burns' lyrics are sung with a sort of forced jolliness, as if everyone imagines they were always sung in bars. The stately arrangement here of Huw Warren on piano and Richard Bolton on cello is based on the Scottish ballad “Major Graham.”  When Tabor sings that she will love the bonnie lass until all the seas run dry, instead of hyperbole it sounds like a real promise.

The cover of the CD shows Tabor green and gold eye looking out from behind the stamens of a Rosa gallica versicolor (Rosa Mundi), “a sport of the Apothecary's rose, crimson and white striped, with a pure Old Rose fragrance.” Somehow that seems to describe Tabor herself well.