Songs for Peter Pears album review – wide-ranging and lucid collection

Robin Tritschler has spread his net wide in bringing together songs written for Peter Pears. The tenor’s lifelong partnership with Benjamin Britten is represented by his ecstatic Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo, the first songs with piano that Britten specifically composed for him, while there are two song cycles by Lennox Berkeley, who shared a house in Aldeburgh with Britten in 1938 before being supplanted by Pears. Berkeley’s Five Housman Songs date from 1940, though Pears never sang them, and they went unperformed until 1978, while Pears himself commissioned Songs of the Half-Light to poems by Walter de la Mare for the 1965 Aldeburgh festival and gave the first performance there with guitarist Julian Bream. Sean Shibe partners Tritschler here.

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Arthur Oldham is best remembered now as a chorus master, but he studied composition with Britten, and composed his Five Chinese Lyrics in 1945 in a distinctly Brittenesque style during those studies. Geoffrey Bush’s set of tiny Songs of the Zodiac (texts by David Gascoyne) evoke Britten too, though Richard Rodney Bennett’s lyrically serial Tom O’Bedlam’s Song, with its cello accompaniment (Philip Higham), is the only work here that comes close to matching the sheer vividness of the Michelangelo Sonnets. But Tritschler’s performances of all these songs are impressively lucid, their diction wonderfully clear; he manages to evoke memories of Pears’s performances without copying them slavishly, and that’s a fine achievement in itself.

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