Divine Music – An English Songbook Thomas Adès: The Lover in Winter; Coffee-Spoon Cavatina; Butterworth: A Shropshire Lad; Nico Muhly: Traditional Songs; New Made Tongue; Old Bones; plus songs by Croft, Howells and Purcell Iestyn Davies (countertenor), Joseph Middleton (piano) Signum Classics SIGCD 725 82:20 mins
‘Clarity, brilliance, tenderness and strangeness’ were the qualities Britten found in Purcell’s music, and they’re all evident in Britten’s arrangement of ‘Lord, What is Man?’ which opens countertenor Iestyn Davies’s recital. Little if anything phases Davies technically: he pins the setting’s wide intervals with laser accuracy, and easily encompasses the trickily embellished closing ‘Hallelujah’.
Purcell’s ‘strangeness’ is memorably distilled in Thomas Adès’s arrangement of ‘An Evening Hymn’, where pianist Joseph Middleton weighs sensitively the probing piano part, and Davies lends to the vocal line an increasingly numinous presence. Adès’s own song cycle The Lover in Winter is included, the ice-like angularities of the piano part contrasting vividly with Davies’s hovering, velvet-soft vocalism.
The Four Traditional Songs by Nico Muhly were premiered by Davies in 2011, and are specially interesting for the minimalistic yet highly expressive piano part Muhly provides to underpin the old folk melodies. Davies and Middleton slot together seamlessly, equal partners in the heartworn melancholy Muhly forefronts in these settings. Muhly’s ability to communicate at least as much through the piano as in the vocal writing is further underlined in the mini-scena ‘Old Bones’, based on the discovery in 2012 of Richard III’s remains in Leicester.
Davies’s smoothly refined countertenor is less naturally suited to the dark, death-haunted melancholy of Butterworth’s A Shropshire Lad, whose final verse is arguably over-milked for emotion. But taken whole this is a classy and interestingly varied recital, with unfailingly sensitive contributions from both performers.
Terry Blain