Songs by Vaughan Williams, Britten,Quilter, Finzi and Ireland
Published:
COMPOSERS: Britten,Finzi and Ireland,Quilter,Songs by Vaughan Williams
LABELS: ABC Classics
ALBUM TITLE: Vagabond
WORKS: Songs of Travel
PERFORMER: Teddy Tahu Rhodes (baritone)Sharolyn Kimmorley (piano)
CATALOGUE NO: 476 7175
Antipodean baritone as dusty,
Armani-clad vagabond: the cover
design of the disc says it all. Teddy
Tahu Rhodes, from New Zealand,
was a personable Papageno recently
at Welsh National Opera and, as
his career begins to take off in opera
houses worldwide, he puts his cards
on the song table.
His easefully projected, warmly
integrated light baritone is well cast
for the striding verse of Masefield
and Robert Louis Stevenson.
Rhodes brings a beguiling oldeworlde
New World nostalgia to
Ireland’s Masefield ballads; but he
needs to engage more robustly in
the bright ring of Stevenson’s words
and with the shifting colours of the
piano writing, so vividly realised by
Sharolyn Kimmorley in Vaughan
Williams’s Songs of Travel.
Quilter and Finzi are as yet a
little penny-plain: Rhodes needs to
find darker, more elusive shadows
in their expressive world. And three
of Britten’s folksong arrangements
reveal a tendency to aspirate rather
than really sing through their legato
lines. But there’s much to enjoy here:
it’s just a little too early, perhaps, to
document it on disc. Hilary Finch