When Deborah Warner took over as artistic director of the Ustinov Studio at Bath’s Theatre Royal, she announced her intention of programming opera, dance and song alongside theatre. Launching her second season there, tenor Ian Bostridge gave a memorable recital, proving just how appropriate a space it is for such performances. The Ustinov is small and darkly intimate, and Bostridge and his pianist, Julius Drake, used the acoustic to great effect, with a pianissimo that would be impossible in most venues carrying wonderfully here.
Recently recovered from a chest infection, Bostridge exercised caution and abandoned the demands of Britten’s Michelangelo Sonnets in favour of a Schubert sequence, while retaining the cycle Winter Words, Op 52, setting eight poems by Thomas Hardy and first performed by Britten and Peter Pears exactly 70 years ago. Britten’s instinct for word-setting and Bostridge’s own instinct for conveying meaning and emotion with disarming clarity made each song a little gem: the opening and closing pieces, with their references to the passage of time, carried a suitably philosophical weight. Bostridge’s gift for narrative elevated Hardy’s descriptions into tiny monodramas, as in At the Station, Upway – the tale of a boy with his violin and a handcuffed convict. In all these, the peerless Drake brought out the wit and elegance of the piano writing, with such characterisation and dramatic detail as to complete a vivid aural picture.
