Benjamin BrittenBefore Life and AfterReview

Mark Padmore’s latest disc, Britten: Before Life and After, features three of his song cycles: The Holy Sonnets of John Donne of 1945, the three Henry Purcell realisations, and his 1953 Thomas Hardy settings, Winter Words. Proceedings are rounded off with five of Britten’s many folk song arrangements. It’s an elegantly, beautifully and stirringly sung recital.

John Donne’s playboy days were well and truly behind him when he wrote his holy sonnets. With their themes of death, repentance and redemption, they were an apt choice of text when Britten returned home from a tour of German concentration camps in 1945, searching for a musical outlet for what he had witnessed. The resultant song settings were written in a matter of days. This declamatory, religious-themed repertoire fits Padmore like a glove, marrying as it does his enduring success as a performer of early sacred music with his newer success as a chamber recitalist.

Furthermore, like Peter Pears for whom they were written (indeed for whom all the songs on this disc were written), one of the roles in which Padmore made his name was (and is) the Evangelist in Bach’s St John Passion. Unsurprisingly then, this is a perfectly judged performance that captures all the songs’ intensity, and makes full use of Padmore’s declamatory and storytelling skills.

The Purcell realisations, also concerned with death and the destination of the soul, do likewise. On to Winter Words, Thomas Hardy’s little vignettes about everyday life and morals, and Padmore and Roger Vignoles are allowed to enter into a more lieder style, albeit a quirky one.

The folk song settings are a fitting close to the programme, beginning with religion and finishing on death. The first in the selection, “I Wonder as I Wander”, is more of a duet between singer and pianist than anything else, and in its barely-accompanied haunting simplicity, the sheer mellifluous beauty of Padmore’s tenor is thrown into sharp relief. So, too, are the subtle dramatic skills of Vignoles and the strong artistic partnership between the two men. A satisfying recital on every level.