Having received a knighthood, some singers would be all too content to settle for safe recitals. But Thomas Allen is still seeing his calculated risks pay off. The first half of this concert was devoted to Mahler: three of his Rückert Lieder, and the four Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen. They showed some of the best of Allen's artistry. Unstinting with his tone, he made even the lengthiest phrases seem to intensify rather than slacken, and he brought out the poignancy of Mahler's own texts with the tiniest of well-placed nuances.
These songs also showed how expertly Allen sees off a challenge. He floated the high note in the opening line of the second Rückert song beautifully, then repeated the trick a little too often; maybe he was wary of his voice cracking on some of the high notes. But he turned what might have been a safety device into an opportunity, making everyone marvel at the control with which he blended that heady half-tone seamlessly with the richness of his full voice.
The risky element of the second half was a world premiere of Julian Philips's Four Sonnets of John Clare. The last song, The Shepherd's Tree, worked the best, ending with Clare's "eternal ditty" winding round the high keys of the piano as if it were a music-box. But even given Graham Johnson's sensitive piano playing, the relentlessly busy accompaniments of the other three seemed to compete with the vocal line, at times masking the strong narrative of Clare's poetry. These songs had apparently been composed with both performers in mind, but seemed written more for Johnson than for Allen.
Allen was on more familiar, witty ground with Ravel's Cinq Melodies Populaires Grecques, and five Shakespeare settings by Haydn, Stanford, Sullivan and Quilter. Nobody else can convey a smutty song with quite such butter-wouldn't-melt filthiness and, in Ravel's Quel Galant, the barest smirk, as the hero invited his girl to check out the sword below his belt, was all the song needed. In a similar way, the final encore, Bridge's The Devon Maid, raised far more laughter than Keats, who supplied the text, probably intended. There is an art to lowering the tone, and Allen is a master.
