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Britten: Serenade for tenor horn and strings; Finzi: Dies Natalis [Hybrid SACD]

Mark Padmore , Britten Sinfonia , Benjamin Britten , Gerald Finzi , Jacqueline Shave , et al. Audio CD
4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
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Product details

  • Performer: Mark Padmore & Stephen Bell & Jacqueline Shave
  • Conductor: Jacqueline Shave
  • Composer: Benjamin Britten, Gerald Finzi
  • Audio CD (7 May 2012)
  • Number of Discs: 1
  • Format: Hybrid SACD
  • Label: Harmonia Mundi Usa
  • ASIN: B006H99HIE
  • Other Editions: MP3 Download
  • Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 57,724 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

1. Prologue - Various Performers
2. Pastoral - Various Performers
3. Nocturne - Various Performers
4. Elegy - Various Performers
5. Dirge - Various Performers
6. Hymn - Various Performers
7. Sonnet - Various Performers
8. Epilogue - Various Performers
9. On a Poet's Lips I Slept - Mark Padmore/Britten Sinfonia
10. Below the Thunders of the Upper Deep - Mark Padmore/Britten Sinfonia
11. Encinctured With a Twine of Leaves - Mark Padmore/Britten Sinfonia
12. Midnight's Bell Goes Ting, Ting, Ting - Mark Padmore/Britten Sinfonia
13. But That Night When On My Bed I Lay - Mark Padmore/Britten Sinfonia
14. She Sleeps On Soft, Last Breaths - Mark Padmore/Britten Sinfonia
15. What Is More Gentle Than a Wind in Summer? - Mark Padmore/Britten Sinfonia
16. When Most I Wink, Then Do Mine Eyes Best See - Mark Padmore/Britten Sinfonia
17. Intrada - Britten Sinfonia
18. Rhapsody - Mark Padmore/Britten Sinfonia
19. The Rapture - Mark Padmore/Britten Sinfonia
20. Wonder - Mark Padmore/Britten Sinfonia
See all 21 tracks on this disc

Product Description

Review

Celebrated tenor Mark Padmore joins the Britten Sinfonia in some of the most beautiful English music for voice and orchestra. The centrepiece is Britten's magical evocation of twilight and nightfall, the 'Serenade' (with Stephen Bell, horn). In Gerald Finzi's war-time cycle 'Dies natalis', the ecstatic mood reflects a child's wide-eyed wonder at the world. Britten's poignant 'Nocturne' completes the programme. --IRR OUTSTANDING: International Record Review, April 2012

There is no conductor for these classic English works, which receive excellent performances from musicians who know them well. Mark Padmore has few, if any, superiors in the Britten works. Stephen Bell is a poetic soloist in the evocative Serenade. Both can be heard at their best in the Blake Elegy. In the Nocturne, the all-round virtuosity of the instrumentalists is thrilling. Finzi's Dies Natalis in turn is beautifully sung and played. --The Daily Telegraph, 15 April 2012

A release that exudes quality. --Time Out

Mark Padmore's new recording is terrific - his voice is expressive, beautiful and terrifying by turns...Finzi s unforced melodic gifts are balm after 50 minutes of death-haunted Britten, and Padmore sings with such sweetness that you ll convince yourself that Finzi was an underrated genius. --Graham Rickson, TheArtsDesk.com, 16 June 2012

The crispness and clarity of diction, with an added degree of pungency to the more disturbing poems, brings a new dimension to these Britten performances ... a superb release --Yorkshire Post August 2012

Product Description

HMF 807552; HARMONIA MUNDI - Francia; Classica Orchestrale

Customer Reviews

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
9 of 9 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars Soft Embalmer 23 May 2012
By Entartete Musik TOP 1000 REVIEWER
Format:Audio CD
Mark Padmore is the melancholic voice of today. His Schubert cycles provided particularly rueful and broken readings of already fragmentary narratives. And he has brought the same intensity to his performances as the evangelists in Bach's Passions, in concert, on stage and on record. It is to those strengths, or rather his strength at portraying weakness and woe, that this latest disc plays.

Britten's song cycles fit Padmore's poetic insights well. There's a weary beauty to his sound, which the Britten Sinfonia answers in refined terms. Throughout the opening of the Serenade for tenor, horn and strings, they create an eerie mixture of stasis and silence, while Padmore's flared vowels and lively consonants bring the text to life. Never languishing, chasing Stephen Bell's nimble calls through the 'Hymn', this is a spirited but spiritual reading of Britten's nocturnal postcards.

As the composer retreats further into the dark with his Nocturne, Padmore follows softly after. Floating lines, as if they might break, his incantations become hypnotic, perched on top of rocking orchestral murmurs. The whispered urgency of 'What is more gentle than a wind in summer?' recalls Peter Quint, with the obbligato woodwind adding strange acidic wit. Despite considerable competition - including Pears, Langridge and Bostridge, to name but three - Padmore's plangent tones and acute understanding of the text provide a modern match.

But what enlivens Britten does not translate to Finzi's Dies natalis. The work may share Britten's harmonic intensity, but the calm and sanguinity of Traherne's poetry places it on a more heavenly plane. The Britten Sinfonia labours 'The Rapture' and Padmore's voice feels too rich for Finzi's 'spotless and pure' cycle. Slower and more syrupy than Wilfred Brown's (to date) peerless reading of this muted marvel, Finzi is overwhelmed by Britten's company. No singer could fully bridge the gap between the innocence of Dies natalis and Britten's post-Freudian experience. But even if Finzi requires a more rational approach, the twisted melancholy of Britten's song cycles finds an insightful mouthpiece in Padmore.

[Britten - 5 Stars / Finzi - 3 Stars]
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5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant 31 Jan 2013
Format:Audio CD|Amazon Verified Purchase
An extra gift to my Father who is thrilled. Great production
Stunning recording Clearly another successful gift for a man I love
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com: 5.0 out of 5 stars  1 review
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars A Near Perfect Combination of Forces 4 July 2012
By Grady Harp - Published on Amazon.com
Format:Audio CD
On this recording the selection of forces are so very well matched that it becomes a genuine collector's item. First the music - and here we have two of Benjamin Britten's most eloquent scores, the Serenade of for Tenor, Horn & Strings and the Nocturne as well as the seldom heard but impressive Dies Natalis of Gerald Finzi. Then the performers - the celebrated tenor Mark Padmore, French hornist Stephen Bell, and the Britten Sinfonia conducted with great sensitivity by Jacqueline Shave. The degree of collaboration among these artists is exemplary.

Though comparisons with other singers is a much abused means of addressing a recording, the fact that Britten wrote these two song cycles of his life partner Peter Pears always raises that sort of discussion. Mark Padmore has an ideal voice for these two Britten song cycles. He has the kind of musical sensitivity and attentiveness to textual subtleties that characterized Pears' singing. His voice is essentially light in the way that Pears' was, but his is infinitely more attractive. Its tone is clear and pure, with none of Pears' nasal quality, and can be sweet without sounding precious. Padmore's technique seems absolutely secure and while his instrument is not large, he can produce an impressive range of dynamics. He and horn player Stephen Bell deliver a terrific performance of the Serenade for tenor, horn, and strings, and Jacqueline Shave's leadership of the Britten Sinfonia is energetic and nuanced. His interpretation of the Nocturne is one of utmost sensitivity. "On a poet's lips I slept", sings Padmore at the start of the Nocturne, a less ponderous and more transient work, and that is just how it seems in these intimate and poetic performances; the sense of poems comes across with extra immediacy, as if Padmore has read the texts many times over before fitting them to the music.

Padmore again excels in bringing intelligent and sensitive, sometimes soaring musicality to the songs in Finzi's cycle Dies Natalis that is something of a novelty, but it fits well with the Britten. His harmonic language is eloquently post-Romantic, solidly in the English pastoral tradition, and his text setting relatively conventional, but the cycle is a lovely, lyrical, entirely successful exemplar of that tradition. Padmore `s warm vibrato sounds handsome in Finzi's sweeping, majestic Dies Natalis (words by Thomas Traherne) - a cycle of songs on a more lyrical, naive note, as the text portrays the world through the eyes of a child. Finzi may not have been given his due as an English composer of stature, but he most certainly holds his own here and completes the mood of the more well known Britten works. Padmore is impeccable, the Britten Sinfonia detailed and expressive and the recording bright and well staged in full sound dimension. Grady Harp, July 12
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