Nicholas Phan

In his excellent booklet notes for
his equally excellent recital of songs by Benjamin Britten, the young American tenor Nicholas Phan writes that his first impressions of the composer’s music “centred on its difficulty: difficult to sing, to play, to understand.” You certainly wouldn’t guess that such had been the case listening to Phan weave his way into and through the bittersweet, nostalgia-edged complexity of the two song cycles and six folk song arrangements featured in his debut solo recording for Avie.

The disc takes its title from a wistful cycle setting eight poems by the English novelist Thomas Hardy. Composed in 1953 (not, as Phan suggests in his note, the following year), Winter Words features some of the most personal music Britten ever set to page, so much so that he was initially reluctant to make the work public. All of the songs refer longingly (and, in places, not a little forlornly) to the lost charms of childhood, and although one could be forgiven for suspecting that a singer still in his early twenties might be ill equipped to capture the diaphanous, filigree delicacy of their surfaces, let alone manage the insistent pull and tug of shadow-lit undercurrents, Phan rises to the challenge with an altogether becoming eloquence.

Perhaps unavoidably, he calls to mind two venerable British singers: Britten’s partner, Peter Pears, in his always mellifluous sensitivity to the music, and his own elder peer, Ian Bostridge, in his intelligent and incisive coloring of text. Which is not to imply that Phan is anything other than himself, for this is no mere act of pastiche or homage. Instead, it reveals a singer of considerable gifts, adroitly idiomatic in the occasionally fey manner peculiar to English art songs of the period, and able to characterize the brittle, innocent emotions of childhood with delectable delicacy of tone and temperament.

The harmonically intricate vocal lines of the Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo present their own particular challenges, as did, for Britten and Pears, the homoerotic nature of the texts, their uneasiness about how audiences might react delaying the first performance until 1942, nearly two years after it was completed.

The cycle requires an almost operatic virtuosity from a singer, and Phan acquits himself with both acrobatic verve and balletic grace, negotiating the expressions of heightened emotions and erotic ecstasy to sublime – one might even, and approvingly, say, seductive – effect.

Throughout he sings with an ease, clarity and control that belies his youthfulness. Sample any of the half dozen folk song arrangements to discover in nimble and nuanced miniature his ability to evoke atmosphere and mood with painterly precision.

Impeccable support is provided by pianist Myra Huang, who maps and marks the terrain with a comparable sense of sure-footed aplomb, all the while framing Phan to the best possible advantage.

The recording, engineered and produced by Marlan Barry in the Bicoastal Music studio in Ossining, NY, is both immediate and intimate. The booklet also includes full texts.

Announcing a remarkable young talent to watch, Phan’s debut has “award winner” stamped through it in every phrase and note.

Read more: http://theclassicalreview.com/cds-dvds/2012/01/britten-winter-words/