Aldeburgh Strings - Britten: Serenade - Hi-Fi News

These Britten recordings were made at Snape Maltings between Oct '12 and Apr '15 - no mention of the Tallis Fantasia in the excellent PDF notes or on the cover but you do get the texts of the great Serenade. Young Apollo had been suppressed by Britten and was first recorded by Simon Rattle in 1982. Prelude and Fugue (1943) was a celebration of Boyd Neel's string orchestra - he had commissioned the Frank Bridge Variations. But a new version of the Serenade with the young British tenor Allan Clayton is the real draw of this download. His singing is consistently clear, the necessary high register timbres rather lovely and the ‘second voice' of Richard Watkins's horn wonderfully integrated. It's almost as if Clayton is talking to his listeners. The undated ‘bonus' Vaughan Williams is cogently directed. CB

Sound Quality: 95%

Powerful, sensitively recorded vocals can demonstrate a remarkable bandwidth, and so it is here with this 96kHz rendering of Clayton's voice where his harmonics ring out to ~30kHz. There is no hint of overload in this recording. PM