A Gardener’s World

Songs by Fauré, Mendelssohn, Schumann et al

Alessandro Fisher (tenor),

Anna Tilbrook (piano)

Rubicon RCD1087 58:52 mins Alessandro Fisher’s debut recording is not so much a garden posy as a whole estate, within which he and his pianist Anna Tilbrook plant a programme that elegantly blends the familiar with the lesser known. So Mendelssohn and Schumann praise violets and the lotus blossom, while later Muriel Herbert’s lovely setting of Herrick’s To Daffodils finds its place alongside two songs by the Argentinian

Carlos Guastavino and the Spanish composer Eduard Toldrà’s A l’ombra del lledoner (In the Shade of the Hackberry Tree).

The best on display are Sibelius’s six Op. 88 songs from 1917, whose sparse piano style belies their emotional depth. Fisher is in fine voice in ‘Törnet’ (The Thorn), a commandingly English tenor with a burnished upper register, while Tilbrook has you reaching for a muffler in the icy piano part of ‘Sippan’ (The Primrose).

The French garden is properly formal, with Fisher joyfully riding the rolling piano part in Fauré’s setting of Victor Hugo’s Le papillon et la fleur. Chausson’s butterfly floats away in the graceful closing bars of Les papillons, and both pianist and tenor make the most of Poulenc’s ‘torch’ song Fleurs, with Fisher deploying an effectively discreet falsetto and Tilbrook sidling into a smoky nightclub style.

Gardens tell human stories, though Elgar rather labours the point in The Language of Flowers. Schubert put it more directly in Die Blumensprache (The Language of Flowers): ‘Flowers reveal the feelings of the heart’. And, in Fisher and Tilbrook’s horticultural recording, much else besides. Christopher Cook PERFORMANCE

RECORDING