The third concert of the Wigmore Hall's Finzi series, which has spotlighted the composer's song output, was always going to be the most revealing. Would Finzi's work still seem unjustly underrated when heard alongside some of the finest examples of 20th-century English- language song? Baritone Thomas Allen and pianist Malcolm Martineau are two very persuasive advocates, and while the song cycle in question, Let Us Garlands Bring, held its own, it was another composer who took the compositional laurels.
Four songs by Peter Warlock, beginning with the sinuous Sleep, each distilled and encapsulated the widely differing atmospheres of their poetry in the composer's richly evocative and original musical voice. Sleep needed a little more intensity, but Martineau's playing was haunting in the distant hunting-horn calls at the end of The Fox, and Allen's robust, mischievous singing made Captain Stratton's Fancy a rollicking hymn to the joys of rum. But then, Allen never had a problem with songs requiring a boisterous wit. His voice may no longer be in its prime, but there are still few British performers who can put a piece across so well. A certain lugubriousness crept into his singing at times, obscuring his consonants - most noticeably in the opening trio of songs by John Ireland - but he was compelling again in the pianissimos and long impassioned crescendo of Frank Bridge's Adoration, and in some of Britten's folk-song settings.
Though not as piquant as the Warlock, the five Shakespeare settings that make up Let Us Garlands Bring showed how skilfully and characterfully Finzi could compose for voice: the subtle byplay of voice and piano in Come Away Death, the cheeky syncopation in Who Is Sylvia? Allen and Martineau rightly made Fear No More the Heat o' the Sun the core of the cycle, creating a powerful sense of stillness around the incantatory final verse. By the time we came to five songs by Americans Charles Ives and Aaron Copland, the concert had accumulated such a British flavour that they sounded like interlopers. Returning to British meadows for the final encore, The Lark in the Clear Air, seemed the only decent thing to do.
