Peter Lindroth

The Wilfred Owen Songs

John Erik Eleby (bass-baritone),

Mats Jansson, Yoriko Asahara (piano) Sterling CDM 3005 53:25 mins

These tender settings of First World War poetry offer an enlightening and heartfelt tribute to Wilfred Owen. Swedish composer Peter Lindroth notes how he discovered Owen’s poetry only later in life: ‘at school in Sweden, in the 1950s and ’60s, one hardly came across any modern poetry, let alone English wartime poetry. Owen came to me through reading Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy.’ The song cycle was composed in 2007-8 and, perhaps as a result of Lindroth’s ‘late’ discovery of Owen, there is a sense of real maturity and restraint to the score that makes it all the more affecting. Lindroth’s compositional style is chiefly tonal and firmly rooted in 20th-century technique, but each song is unerringly sensitive to the craft of Owen’s writing; this ranges from the off-kilter lullaby that threads through ‘Arms and the Boy’ with its terrible ‘sharpness of grief and death’, to the desolate crashing piano chords that punctuate ‘I Saw His Round Mouth’s Crimson’.

John Erik Eleby’s bass-baritone voice is especially strong and full in the lower registers, yet there is also a palpable vulnerability to his performance at times. This is not the voice of a young man and the sense of exposure and very occasional cracks in the sound only make the interpretation more powerful. Pianist Mats Jansson is splendidly assured throughout, be it rendering the cascading ragtime piano line of ‘Insensibility’ to capturing the delicate lyricism of ‘The Chances’. This is a rich and affecting work, performed with corresponding warmth and nuance. Kate Wakeling PERFORMANCE ★★★★ RECORDING ★★★★