Andrew Stewart
Classic FM Magazine
September 2008

For all his rootedness in the east Suffolk landscape, Britten’s sensibility for ‘exotic’ sounds (whether musical or linguistical) helped carry his work in directions rarely explored by other English composers. His settings of German, French and Italian poetry are both unmistakeably Britten and, more often then not, idiomatic in their treatment of foreign words. That’s certainly the impression left by this outstanding recital. Listen, for example, to Mark Padmore’s haunting delivery of ‘Um Mitternacht’ or Susan Gritton’s sinuous exposition of “Des Linien des Lebens’. The superior quality of the music-making here matches that of the music itself. A great album.