Lennox Berkeley
Five Housman Songs Op 14, part 3
Songs of the Half-Light Op 65*
Britten
Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo Op 22
Arthur Oldham
Five Chinese Lyrics
Richard Rodney Bennett
Tom O’Bedlam’s Song**
Geoffrey Bush
Songs of the Zodiac
*Sean Shibe (guitar)
** Philip Higham (cello)
Robin Tritschler (tenor)
Malcolm Martineau (piano)
Song of the Half-Light & Tom O’Bedlam’s Song recorded 31 October 2021 at St Augustine’s Church, Kilburn, London. The rest, 24 to 26 Sept 2021 at Wyastone Estate, Monmouth
Reviewed by: Rob Pennock
Reviewed: July 2024
CD No: Signum Classics CD, download and stream: SKU SIGCD774
Duration: 73 minutes
This recital by the young Irish tenor Robin Tritschler contains songs written for the great Peter Pears, none of which, other than those by his partner Benjamin Britten, are part of the standard repertoire.
It opens with Lennox Berkeley’s Houseman settings, written in 1940 in the wake of his unrequited love for Britten. In the opening song and throughout the album one can hear the burnished tone and immaculate diction of Tritschler’s beautifully focused and projected light tenor and, as always, Malcolm Martineau’s piano playing is superb. The musical language is conventional with echoes of Butterworth and Finzi and Tritschler use plenty vocal and dynamic shading to bring the songs to life. Written twenty five years later Sounds of the Half-Light features a guitar in five introspective de la Mare settings, which Tritschler again brings to vivid life, ably assisted by Sean Shibe.
Arthur Oldham’s 1951 settings of Five Chinese Lyrics are, if hardly memorable, divertingly inventive and one can say much the same of Geoffrey Bush’s Songs of the Zodiac, where, rather irritatingly Tritschler announces the sign name of each song. Nevertheless the performances are very fine.
Richard Rodney Bennett’s ten minute description of a wandering former inmate of Bedlam is in a different class, mixing serialism with rich melody and declamation, where the cello and singer create a strange, conversational disharmony and Higham’s intonation is immaculate.
At the recitals core lies Britten’s masterpiece the Michelangelo Sonnets of 1940. Here both artists encompass their huge emotional range, but in the sublime Sonnet XXX, despite a very slow tempo, Tritschler cannot equal Anthony Rolfe Johnson’s (Virgin) introspection or range of pianissimo shading and throughout the cycle he and Graham Johnson seem more inside the music.
The 24/192 stream is excellent and it is obvious that the two venues have a different acoustic and reverberation time, which is as it should be. All of the performers are there in front of you and their timbres are well-reproduced. The excellent programme notes are by Robin Tritschler himself, although it would have been helpful if the track listing mentioned which songs Shibe and Higham played on.