Nicholas Phan

★★★★★
There are numerous tenors around now with the stamina Britten requires in the Michelangelo Sonnets.  I would put William Burden and Toby Spence at the top of my list, but the favoured recording artists tend to be the likes of Mark Padmore and Ian Bostridge – sensitive plants both, but no musclemen vocally.  So welcome, please, Nicholas Phan, caught at the right stage in his career, though fortunately not as callow as Peter Pears when he first recorded the Sonnets with new love Britten in 1942.  Phan has both the introspection and the power for this idiosyncratic approach to Italian fire…the Hardy tableaux of Winter Words are all atmospherically evoked alongside the best – Philip Langridge, Anthony Rolfe Johnson…what wins this disc its five stars is the spacious, deeply moving delivery of my favourite among all the folksong settings, ‘The Last Rose of Summer’…