Aldeburgh Strings - Britten: Serenade - Daily Mail

Next month Linn has a well-recorded album out deriving from performances given at the Aldeburgh Festival between October 2012 and April 2015. It's only 55 minutes long but any reservations should be set aside because of the exceptional performance here of the Serenade For Tenor, Horn and Strings, one of the greatest masterpieces of British music.

The opening phrase of the Pastoral makes clear that the young British tenor Allan Clayton is blessed with the same kind of high tenor voice as Peter Pears, Britten's partner, for whom the piece was written. But Clayton's vocal production is much better controlled, smooth and mellow, and entirely without the sort of strangulated, drowning-the-cat timbre that, if truth be told, so often put off all but Pears's most dedicated admirers.