Here’s a really lovely disc from two of classical song’s brightest artists. The soprano Louise Alder and pianist Joseph Middleton start with Rachmaninov and end with Britten, taking in Sibelius, Grieg, Tchaikovsky and Medtner on the way; the music’s geographical progress mirrors the journey Alder’s great-grandparents made as refugees in 1916, from Odessa to Finland, Norway and finally Britain. Alder describes it as a “meandering sleigh ride”, though if that conveys the unhurried way in which these well-chosen songs lead into one another it doesn’t quite do justice to the focus with which they come across. Alder is in glorious voice, her soprano fresh and untethered; the assurance of youth and the doubt born of experience come across equally convincingly. Her high notes gleam, and her words are direct and communicative, whether in Russian, Swedish, German or French.
Middleton’s playing fills in everything those words can’t say, perfectly calibrated to support Alder but huge in its expressive scope. There will be discoveries here for all but the most dedicated song aficionados, from Rachmaninov’s dreamy sensuousness and Sibelius’s melancholic ardour, to Tchaikovsky’s French numbers, which have an arch, almost salon-ish tinge. Grieg’s The Discreet Nightingale finds Alder and Middleton revelling quietly in the refrain’s delicious, knowing languor. Then there are two songs by Nikolai Medtner: a sparkling Mailied full of expectancy and the ominous Meeresstille that’s clearly about a loneliness more universal than that of the becalmed sailor of Goethe’s poem. The title track is the final song in Britten’s Pushkin cycle The Poet’s Echo, in which Middleton’s piano traces an eerie tick-tocking around Alder’s searching vocal line: a haunting end to a disc you will want to play again right away.
This week’s other pick
With Sheku Kanneh-Mason’s new disc nudging along just below Stormzy in the Top 10, you can’t move for commentators simultaneously worrying he’s being pushed too far too soon and bemoaning the fact that he’s not Jacqueline du Pré. True, this performance of Elgar’s Cello Concerto doesn’t quite ignite, but that’s perhaps as much to do with a lack of fruitful tension between soloist and orchestra – the LSO, under Simon Rattle – as with the thoughtful playing of Kanneh-Mason himself. The rest of the disc, involving a roomful of chamber-music partners, taking in haunting Bloch and Bridge and ending with Julius Klengel’s lush Hymnus for 12 cellos, is an old-school potpourri that works beautifully.
