Wigmore Hall, London
23 May 2011, 19:30
Ian Bostridge (tenor)
Julius Drake (piano)
Pucell/Tippett: Music for while
Bach/Britten: Five Spiritual Songs
Haydn:
Content
Sailor’s song
She never told her love
The wanderer
Fidelity
Purcell/Britten: The Queen’s Epicedium
Britten: From Who are these Children? Op 84
Nightmare
Slaughter
Who are these Children
The Children
Weill:
Beat! Beat! Drums!
O captain! My captain!
Come up from the fields, father
Dirge for two veterens
Reviews
Erica Jeal, the Guardian, 24 May 2011
“Music for a while shall all your cares beguile,” promised Ian Bostridge at the opening of his recital with pianist Julius Drake, to notes by Purcell. The tenor sounded as sincere as ever. Yet by the time they closed their intriguing programme with an encore of the same song, it seemed almost ironic.
The first half had upbeat moments. Bach’s Kommt, Seelen, dieser Tag, the second of his Geistliche Lieder, was an invitation to celebrate, extended with conviction. And all that was missing from Bostridge’s roistering performance of the Sailor’s Song from Haydn’s Five English Canzonettas was a slap on the thigh.
Elsewhere, the presiding humour of the Haydn is melancholy, something Bostridge is exceptionally good at. Drake was equally eloquent, especially in the long introduction to She Never Told Her Love. And the other Bach songs all reflect on death. Bostridge and Drake gave them due weight, though the final song, Bist du bei mir, sounds misplaced in Britten’s arrangement, like cathedral music locked in the drawing room.
The second half began with Purcell’s The Queen’s Epicedium, which singer and pianist directed to an impassioned conclusion. Four songs from Britten’s late cycle Who Are These Children? marked the evening’s darkest point, Drake weaving the sinister, obsessive piano lines, Bostridge peppering the music’s angularity with snarling enunciation; but his lower range sounded constrained.
The Whitman war poems that Kurt Weill chose for his Four Songs are scarcely less tragic, though Weill’s bluesy inflections seem to supply some small consolation; and the Yankee march underpinning the Dirge for Two Veterans here retained some affection as well as irony. But this was not a programme to beguile the cares so much as to bring them starkly to the surface.