More than any other countertenor, Bejun Mehta has persisted in exploring the mainstream song repertoire composed between the late-18th and mid-20th centuries – in other words, at a time when the countertenor voice was itself unfashionable and ignored. The programme for his latest recital could consequently be seen as an expression of both his methodology and intent. Opening in what is very much countertenor territory with songs by Purcell, he then passed beyond it to early-20th-century English song via Haydn and Beethoven.

Much of it was done with the kind of virile charm we associate him with. Mehta has always been able to communicate the pleasure he takes in singing, and when he launched into Vaughan Williams’s Linden Lea, one was as much won over by his relaxed stance and the contented gleam in his eye as by the sounds he made. Some of it was wonderfully persuasive. No tenor, baritone or mezzo could quite produce the unearthly pianissimos with which he characterised Stanford’s chilly La Belle Dame Sans Merci. His choice of Haydn songs, a group of English canzonettas written in 1794, was uninspired, although Beethoven’s An Die Ferne Geliebte, its complex piano part superbly played by Julius Drake, was appealing in its sensual freshness.

Yet his voice has also been in better shape. Mehta’s bronzed, distinctively masculine tone is still very much in evidence, but his voice has become bigger and now has a tendency to unwieldiness: a vibrato sometimes creeps in, causing notes to flatten. One hopes the problem is temporary, since he’s a fine artist and, more importantly, a challenging one. But it detracted from what was otherwise a provocatively intelligent recital.

Stephen Jay- Taylor, operabritannica.com, 11.12.2009

3 stars of 5

Some twenty years ago I remember vividly an evening spent in the company of a well-connected voice-fancier whose idea of fun was to torment his guests by playing them performances of familiar repertory, and then demanding to know who the singer was. I had been faring rather well, until he played an astonishing account of Schubert’s Der Hirt auf dem Felsen, sung with such instrumental purity of tone, exquisitely poised midway between Gundula Janowitz and Margaret Price, that I was seriously embarrassed at not being able to identify the performer, who, it seemed to me, had an almost ideal, silvery, lyric soprano. I reeled off an ever-more improbable list – Valerie Masterson, the very young Karita Mattila – realising that with every desperate guess, the slow, smug shaking of the head in response signalled ever-lengthening distance from the truth. In the end, I gave up, utterly clueless. Then I was informed that it was a recording of the pre-pubertal Bejun Mehta, made before his voice had broken. Embarrassment was replaced by amazement, for nothing in the singing had sounded remotely like a boy soprano, so fully rounded and warmly vibrant, yet evenly-produced was it, a technique most adult women would envy.

I thought of that sound again tonight at the Wigmore Hall, where Bejun Mehta, counter-tenor, made what I believe was his London recital debut, accompanied by Julius Drake, though he has of course already sung at Covent Garden (in Handel’s Orlando). The kind of accept-no-limits musical attitude that had him singing late Schubert as a boy is clearly still in evidence in his approach to programme building even now, where he studiously for the most part avoids the obvious stopping-off points for his voice-type – Baroque music written for castrati, and late C20th creations for counter-tenors – preferring instead to sing music from the mainstream normally performed by tenors or baritones. Of course, he is not the first to do this: both David Daniels and Philippe Jaroussky have sung live programmes and given us discs of well-upholstered Victorian French salon music, for the most part voluptuously feminine, and which in both cases seem to me to have strained considerably against both sense and suitability. Mehta’s programme, in stark chronological contrast, offered nothing that seemed other than appropriate for his voice, with a first half of Purcell, Haydn and Beethoven, and a second of entirely early C20th English songs – the exception being Stanford’s 1877 La Belle Dame sans merci – from the likes of Vaughan Williams, Howells and Warlock.

It was immediately apparent that much of Mehta’s instrumental purity has been sacrificed in pursuit of power, a voice now almost unwieldy in normal use as demanded by recital – as opposed to operatic – repertoire. He has also developed a cumulatively wearing bad habit of beginning nearly all new lines on a semi-crooned voce bianca, swelling the sound (and occasionally only then securing the pitch) until a surprisingly generous, almost female, vibrato takes over. This is how Gwyneth Jones used to sing. But she, I always felt, had no technical choices in the matter. Mehta does, because when he wants, the vibrato is even and closely knit into the fabric of the voice: alas, he just doesn’t seem to want it very much, preferring to sing in a mask-orientated, somewhat nasal, white tone, or all-out slow throbbing. I have to say, coming from a counter-tenor, it is not particularly agreeable in effect, and robs the voice of most opportunities for colouration. It also doesn’t help that the hall’s over-generous acoustic, which lends a solo piano the sonority and decibel-count of a pneumatic drill, and somehow sounds like a swimming pool trapped inside a telephone box, leaves even a counter-tenor sounding like Turandot in a temper.

The opening four Purcell pieces functioned much as they would in anybody else’s programme, irrespective of voice-type: warm-up fodder, gently feeling one’s way into both the music, and one’s own voice. The English diction was decent but not exemplary, though he deserves great credit for unobtrusively observing the characteristic long “a”s in rather and grass later on in the VW, which can hardly come naturally to him. But I found the tone uneven, and the trills more like a momentary flutter than an even alternation of two notes. The Haydn triptych fared better, and his solitary Shakespeare setting – She never told her love – was put across with a deal of artistry, though culminating in an almost grotesque plunge out of falsetto register on the last word, “grief”. Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte is at least as much a test for the pianist as the singer, sustaining its brief, fifteen-minute duration with links between the six separate songs that consequently flow one into another. Mehta’s approach seemed sound, and, reservations about his latter-day vocal method apart, he sang with great intensity, though I found the accompaniment both deafening and occasionally awkward.

The two VW songs in the second half, Linden Lea and Silent Noon, struck me as the most successful items, though Stanford’s spooky Gothic melodramatic ballad was effective, as were the two Howells songs, The widow bird and The little boy lost, even if the latter suffered somewhat from the inevitable difficulty in finding a voice for the two different characters, the shivering boy and the impersonal narrator, who emerged sounding exactly the same. The two Warlock songs – The lover’s maze and Jillian of Bury – both set rather trifling Eizabethan poetry, and can’t be said to have added much to proceedings, though Ivor Gurney’s lovely Down by the Salley Gardens is a charming piece of aching nostalgia, movingly captured by both singer and accompanist. The official programme lasted just on an hour of music, but enthusiastic applause produced two encores, the first Victor Hely-Hutchinson’s scatty piece of pastiche Handel, Old Mother Hubbard (which Mehta rather oddly imagined would be familiar to all those present: I bet it wasn’t) followed by Music for a while, drawn from Purcell’s incidental music to Dryden’s version of Oedipus. It isn’t the first time I’ve been to a recital where the encores found the singer in slightly more relaxed form, technically more assured and communicative, than in the body of the programme, and the Purcell, in particular, was as near to a piece of flawless singing as we heard all night. Given the prevailing parsimony, it’s a shame we didn’t then have a second interval, prefacing a third half (!!) of who knows what musical and vocal delights. Still, you can’t have everything…