Padmore is perhaps today’s outstanding interpreter of the repertoire Britten wrote for his musical and life partner, Peter Pears. His distinctive timbre, his colouring of words and his understanding of the drama of Britten’s word-setting make him an ideal exponent of the Holy Sonnets of John Donne, written after a concert tour, with Yehudi Menuhin, of the concentration camps in post-war Germany, and the later, gentler Thomas Hardy cycle, Winter Words. Donne’s metaphysical verse is dauntingly anguished, but Britten’s music finds great rhythmic variety in the sonnets. Padmore and Vignoles burrow deeply into Donne’s “blacke soule”, finding the right tone for each of the nine settings. The angular, angry Batter my heart and Oh, to vex me benefit from the pianist’s brilliant clarity and sense of dramatic pulse. Padmore’s eloquence and depth of feeling surface movingly in Donne’s lament for his dead wife, Since she whom I loved. And both musicians rise to the intense defiance of the climactic Death, thou shalt die, in the final song. Before life and after is the more consoling conclusion to the Hardy cycle, and Padmore lavishes a palette of tone colour to match or even outshine Pears here. His English diction has an unfussy naturalness, and Vignoles captures the descriptive imagery of the piano parts with their descriptions of the train whistle and the boy’s violin. Padmore’s voice now sounds dark for Purcell, but the three Britten realisations suit it well, and the disc is rounded off by five of Britten’s most attractive folk-song arrangements. HC

Harmonia Mundi HMU907443

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