If Music (Erato) ★★★★
Day of These Days (Delphian) ★★★
Eisnacht (Genuin) ★★★
Vocal recitals come thick and fast but seldom with revelation. This week brought three standouts.
The Polish countertenor Jakub Jozef Orlinski claims dual attention as an opera star and a street breakdancer. In his Erato album he sings quietly, almost self-effacingly, with Michal Biel at the piano. Opening with Purcell’s “Music for a while” and closing with Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring”, it looks like a standard Baroque hit parade. But in between Orlinski mixes off-menu arias, in moods that veer from decorative to menace. Purcell’s “Your awful voice” was new to me as were a couple of cuts from Handel’s Agrippina and an eight-minute intermezzo by a chap called Fux (look him up). The marvel throughout is the security of Orlinski’s tone. No hint of wobble, no edge of note. If it’s beauty you’re after, spin no further.
An album subtitled “The British Isles Reflected in Song” sounds as cosy as cheese on toast. It isn’t. After an obligatory pair of Brittens, bass-baritone Tristan Hambleton and pianist Simon Lepper swing down lanes and byways. The title song, by Sally Beamish, is a contemplative ramble. Songs by Frank Bridge, Britten’s teacher, hide like a robin from a hedgerow. And gems by living composers — Tarik O’Regan, Huw Watkins, James MacMillan, Stuart MacRae and Richard Sisson — compose a portrait of an island diverse in temperament and temperature. I was much taken by MacRae’s darkly internalised “I know not how it is with you”.
Altogether unexpected was mezzo-soprano Pia Viola Buchert’s ice-night album of Lieder by exiled German Jews. Why would composers who fled their motherland cling to that most German of art-forms, the Lied? Nostalgia, maybe, but there’s more to these songs than loss and longing. Walter Arlen mingled with Hollywood stars, Felix Wolfe conducted at the Met, Hans Gal settled in Edinburgh. Ursula Mamlok and Ruth Schonthal were doubly disadvantaged as women and refugees. A cycle by Schonthal is utterly compelling, the singer’s empathy pronounced in shrill angst at the top of her voice. Altogether, a great week for excavating lost songs.
