COMPOSERS: BrittenFinziTippett
LABELS: Hyperion
ALBUM TITLE: Britten, Finzi & Tippett
WORKS: Who are these children?; Sechs Holderlin-Fragmentet; Um Mitternacht
PERFORMER: Mark PadmoreRoger Vignoles
CATALOGUE NO: CDA 67459
As pianist Roger Vignoles says in his
notes to this disc, there need be no
prizes for guessing the theme that links
Tippett’s Boyhood’s End with Finzi’s
A Young Man’s Exhortation and
Britten’s Who are these children?. But
one of the things that makes this
disc so enjoyable and stimulating as
a complete recital is the differences
in perspective between these song
cycles. Who are these children? pursues
Britten’s life-long preoccupation
with threatened and finally destroyed
innocence, but his Hölderlin Fragments
offer at least a hint of spiritual
consolation, while the perennially
more positive Tippett holds out hope
that, in its best sense, innocence can
survive the transition to manhood. Finzi is more resigned and bittersweet,
but he too offers the possibility that
one can make peace with mortality.
Mark Padmore and Roger Vignoles
perform all these songs with great
understanding and sensitivity; in fact
I was surprised at how much intensity
of feeling they found in the stark
Hölderlin songs. Padmore is equally
at ease with the minutely expressive
wordsetting of the Britten songs and
the long soaring lines of the Tippett.
I’m not quite so convinced by his Finzi
– warm, worldly nostalgia doesn’t
seem to suit him quite as well as the
somewhat harder truths of Britten and
Tippett – but the sense of progression
is compelling, with the solitary late
masterpiece Um Mitternacht making a
wonderful, if slightly unsettling finale.
Stephen Johnson