Britten Canticles – Nicholas Phan

Benjamin Britten spent much of his creative life circling around the idea of innocence destroyed — and the circling was never merely sentimental. The Canticles, those compressed, occasionally cryptic pieces he produced between 1947 and 1974, are among the places where you feel that preoccupation most nakedly. They’re not quite songs and not quite dramatic scenas; they occupy their own peculiar territory, which is part of what makes them so difficult to bring off and so revelatory when someone does.

The fifth Canticle — the last one Britten completed, setting T.S. Eliot’s early poem about Saint Narcissus — is a strange and haunting thing, a kind of self-portrait in disguise. Britten wrote it in 1974, just two years before his death, and it has the quality of a man listening to himself from a great distance. Phan’s tenor is lean without being cold, and he navigates the score’s oscillations between near-speech and full lyric flight with an ease that masks the real difficulty of the piece. Jennifer Montone’s horn — playing offstage, as Britten specified — arrives like a memory of something you can’t quite name. The spatial effect, when it works, is not a gimmick; it’s structural. Here it works.

The folk songs are another matter, or rather, several other matters at once.

Britten arranged folk songs throughout his career — English, French, Irish, Scottish, Welsh — and the arrangements tell you something essential about him: his ear for modal harmony, his willingness to let a simple tune carry genuine weight, his wit. The harp settings, which Phan performs with Sivan Magen, are less familiar than the piano sets, and they reward the attention. “Bugeilio’r Gwenith Gwyn” — the Welsh song about watching the wheat — gets a harp accompaniment of such translucent delicacy that the instrument seems to dissolve into the overtones of Phan’s voice. “Dafydd y Garreg Wen,” the song named for the blind Welsh harper David of the White Rock, has an almost unbearable tenderness in this reading; Magen finds a tone that is neither bright nor dark but something suspended between them.

Myra Huang takes over the keyboard for the piano folk songs, and she is a pianist who listens — which sounds like faint praise but isn’t. The piano settings demand a different kind of collaboration than the harp ones, more grounded, sometimes more satirical. “The False Knight upon the Road” crackles with sly menace. The brief “Bird Scarer’s Song” is gone before you’ve registered it’s begun, which is exactly right.

Alan Cumming narrates — the program notes don’t specify what — and his presence on a classical disc of this kind is either a brilliant idea or a puzzling one, depending on your tolerance for crossover gestures. Cumming is a genuinely gifted actor and his voice has a distinctive grain, slightly roughened, Scottish beneath its theatrical polish. Whether the narration illuminates what surrounds it or merely provides context for listeners new to Britten is a question worth asking.

But Phan is the center of gravity here, and that’s as it should be. His diction is superb — every consonant placed without seeming placed — and he has the rarer gift of making you feel that the text and the music arrived at the same moment, that they couldn’t have been otherwise. Peter Pears, for whom Britten wrote so much of this repertoire, had a timbre that was entirely his own, unmistakable and occasionally, frankly, an acquired taste. Phan doesn’t imitate Pears — why would he? — but he understands what Pears understood: that this music lives at the intersection of vulnerability and precision, and that pushing too hard in either direction destroys the balance.

Recorded sound is clean and present without being clinical. The harp is particularly well captured — a notoriously difficult instrument to record without either blurring its resonances or making it sound like a furniture showroom.

This is a serious, luminous disc, and it deserves to be heard.