These Pears-shaped pieces are just ripe for revival, says Ashutosh Khandekar’s review of Robin Tritschler and co’s Peter Pears songs tribute
Songs for Peter Pears
Works by L Berkeley, Britten, RR Bennett, Bush and Oldham
Robin Tritschler (tenor), Malcolm Martineau (piano) et al
Signum Classics SIGCD774 73:25 mins
Clip: Lennox Berkeley – Songs of the Half-Light, Op. 65, The Fleeting
Peter Pears established a particular English tenor sound in the ’40s that influenced generations of singers to come – at once masculine and confident, while prone to shadowy, neurotic undercurrents.
Robin Tritschler has none of Pears’s uptight characteristics and never sounds like a parody.
He delivers Lennox Berkeley’s expressionistic settings of AE Housman poems with luminous tone and unflinching emotional directness, full of the resignation and bitterness of unrequited love.
Malcolm Martineau’s radiant piano playing underscores the heartache.
Berkeley’s Songs of the Half-Light was commissioned by Pears to be performed with guitarist Julian Bream at the 1965 Aldeburgh Festival.
Walter de La Mare’s poems explore the fleeting quality of life, and guitarist Sean Shibe brings an astonishing range of sonic effects, adding the subtlest of brushstrokes to Tritschler’s glinting vocal palette.
‘Tom O’Bedlam’s Song’, commissioned from a 25-year-old Richard Rodney Bennett, features a tour de force from cellist Philip Higham, who joins Tritschler in a wild, moody descent into insanity.
The Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo were the first songs that Britten specifically wrote for Pears, illustrating aspects of the tenor’s voice that appealed to the composer.
Tritschler embraces the virtuosity of Britten’s writing effortlessly, his tone glowing and vibrant.
Peter Pears may be the inspiration for these songs, but with this collection Tritschler and his three superb collaborators have renewed and reinforced their enduring expressive power and impact. Ashutosh Khandekar