Recordings

This disc collects 24 songs from more than a dozen composers who straddle the 19th and 20th centuries, from Charles Villiers Stanford to Benjamin Britten. All the pieces are lovely and worthy, but a certain drowsy sameness sets in as Bostridge sings in his refined, slender, dryish tenor. He enunciates clearly and makes lines float, but you can’t help feeling that at least a few of the songs could benefit from a more robust delivery and attack, that Ivor Gurney’s song about a plowman’s son, for instance, should resound to the skies from a more pungent, loamy soil, or that Stanford’s haunting setting of Keats’ “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” should strike the ear more chillingly. Drake is the discreet, supportive accompanist.