Benjamin Britten’s songs and chamber music are a feature of the autumn programme at the Wigmore Hall, and the new season opened with an all-Britten evening. This gala featured four of his song cycles, with a different singer for each and pianist James Baillieu as the common denominator between them.
The cycles were performed in descending order of voice type, and so it happened that the earliest of the four, On This Island Op 11, the 1937 settings for soprano of poems by WH Auden, began the evening, and the latest, Songs and Proverbs of William Blake Op 74 for baritone, from 1965, ended it. That drew attention nicely to the stylistic distance that Britten’s songwriting travelled over the intervening years, and especially to the way the role of the piano in the cycles increased in significance and independence, as Baillieu’s perceptive playing underlined.
But Louise Alder revealed that alongside the almost baroque ornamentation of some of the word setting in On This Island, which she negotiated with such flair, there are intimations of the later, more searching Britten, especially in the darkly introspective fourth song, Nocturne, while in the Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo, the first work that Britten wrote for Peter Pears, in 1940, tenor Allan Clayton judged exactly the right balance between declamatory power and lyrical intimacy needed for these thinly veiled declarations of love.
Mezzo Jennifer Johnston, a day-of-the-concert replacement for Christine Rice, made less of an impression in the pared-down mix of settings in A Charm of Lullabies, while James Newby took on the Blake cycle, the most intricate and emotionally complex of the four. His performance didn’t always have quite the range of verbal nuance Britten’s songs sometimes imply, but then they were originally written for Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, and that’s a hard act for any subsequent baritone to emulate.
