Will be broadcast on 23 June on BBC3 Lunchtime Concert

Bostridge’s programme of 20th-century realizations of 17th-century songs coupled with Britten and Weill’s very different approaches to anti-war poetry make for a programme of contrasts.

Tippett and Britten’s highly individual realizations, all written for Peter Pears, bear witness to both composers’ enthusiasm for Bach and Purcell.

Weill’s martial, even jaunty settings, are seemingly at odds with Whitman’s anguished laments; while Britten’s songs, shorn of their whimsical companion pieces in Scots dialect, display stark intensity…

What the critics say

Hilary Finch, The Times, 17.6.2010

But why did he sing those Haydn English Canzonettas in German? A bewildered audience member asked at Ian Bostridge’s beautifully devised festival recital. Well, of course he didn’t. But, combine Bostridge’s tendency to mangle vowels with the festival’s denial of songs texts to its audience , and confusion reigns.

Haydn actually set his hurly-burly of the Sailor’s song and his pathos-tinted Shakespeare with flair and sympathy. Bostridge and Julius Drake delighted in turning them into little salon melodramas at the end of the first half whose main attraction was the rarely performed settings by Britten of Five Spiritual Songs by Bach. Drake captured their quiet reverence, even if Bostridge seemed not entirely at ease.

After the interal, though, he was in fine form for Britten’s arrangement of Purcell’s elegiac and florid The Queens Epicedium – and then for a richly rewarding pairing. First we heard four of Britten’s impassioned protest settings of poems by the Scottish socialist William Soutar in his cycle Who are these children. But the words were, again, only partially audible  – and the audience couldn’t even enjoy them in their program books. Similarly, the lack of song texts deprived us of a full, close-focus experience of Kurt Weill’s Four Walt Whitman Settings. But Bostridge and Drake performed these heart-rending war songs with a will: their pain and latent anger at least found its way through.