Little Wanderer
Works by Britten, Imogen Holst, Daniel Kidane et al
Nick Pritchard (tenor), Ian Tindale (piano)
Signum Classics SIGCD952 62:15 mins
It’s a daunting programme that Nick Pritchard, a much-lauded Evangelist in Bach’s Passions, has chosen for his debut album with Ian Tindale. Utterly English too, with Benjamin Britten and his Aldeburgh amanuensis Imogen Holst joined by a first recording of Daniel Kidane’s Songs of Illumination.
Pritchard’s diction is as scrupulous as Britten’s settings of Thomas Hardy’s text in Winter Words with an exemplary sense of telling the ‘story’ in ‘Midnight on the Great Western’, as a night train carries an innocent boy into the darkness. If he lacks that sense of ironic detachment that Britten finds in ‘The Little Old Table’ and elsewhere, that surely will come.
Imogen Holst hid her composing light under a bushel, but her songs reveal a talent shared with Britten for setting English texts. The heavy tread of the piano in ‘Why fearest thou thy outward foe?’ or the dancing rhythms in the Earl of Surrey’s Sonnet ‘Brittle Beauty’, both found by Holst in Tottel’s Miscellany (1557), never mask the text. These are songs that certainly deserve to be far better known.
As do Daniel Kidane’s settings of three poems by William Blake, Songs of Illumination. The tessitura is challenging in ‘The Little Black Boy’ and the piano part in ‘A Dream’ daunting, as left and right hands seem to go their own way, but Pritchard and Tindale are up to the challenge.
To end, a near perfect set of encores. Britten’s gloriously wayward settings of English folk songs – including ‘The Last Rose of Summer’, ‘How Sweet the Answer’ and a rollicking version of ‘The Ploughboy’ – will send you home happy.
