Young tenor’s naked honesty and impeccable pitch makes for a recital of unadulterated joy
Allan Clayton and James Baillieu Wigmore Hall, London W1
★★★★★
It’s given me enormous pleasure over the past decade to follow the musical progress of Allan Clayton. His promise was blazingly evident from his student days, but I couldn’t have guessed then quite how far and how quickly he would develop from his Cambridge choral scholar roots into a full-blown lyric tenor.
He’s still in his 30s (albeit now as facially hirsute as a venerable Victorian patriarch), and his peak could lie ahead: next year he is scheduled to sing Peter Grimes for the first time, and his superb projection and command of brazen, trumpet-like tones suggest that soon he could be ready to tackle the challenges of Wagner’s Lohengrin or Walther in Die Meistersinger.
Already his artistry seems mature, and in this latest of the Wigmore Hall’s wonderful series of lockdown lunchtime recitals, he proved that although his voice has grown in volume and security, he has retained the ability to sing softly and sweetly. His technique is excellent: there is no sense of strain or tremble, and his pitching sounds to me impeccable. Most impressive of all is the quality of naked honesty and clear focus to his singing: nothing about it is faked or forced.
His programme here was simple. He started with Schumann’s Op 35 cycle of 12 lieder to texts by Justinus Kerner, where he combined robust assertion, vivid evocation and romantic melancholy, to particularly exquisite effect in Stirb, Lieb’ und Freud’. Then followed two groups of English songs. First came Vaughan Williams’s delicately inflected Orpheus with his Lute, Bridge’s arresting Journey’s End with its strange lurches into atonal harmony, and Quilter’s Go, Lovely Rose, the essence of pastoralism. But best of all were three of Britten’s folk-song arrangements. Their raw simplicity was heart-stopping, and Clayton captured all the wistful yearning of Sally in our Alley, the bumptious comedy in The Plough Boy and the haunting modal bleakness of I Wonder as I Wander.
James Baillieu was the sensitive and supportive pianist. In the Schumann, I felt he was somewhat too tactfully recessive – or was that the fault of the BBC’S recording apparatus? Otherwise, this was unadulterated joy.