Sidmouth Music’s 40th anniversary season continues with recital by tenor Andrew Tortise

THE fourth recital in Sidmouth Music’s 40th anniversary season will feature rising British young tenor Andrew Tortise accompanied by pianist Nicola Eimer in what promises to be a thrilling programme of song.

Whether it’s in large scale works like Bach’s St Matthews Passion or Wagner’s Die Meistersinger, or the sort of intimate song cycles he will present to Sidmouth at Knowle on Saturday, February 4, at 3pm, Andrew is attracting seriously good press reviews.

Compliments range through powerful, winsome, terrifically intense, seductive, ideal, and back again. For his Sidmouth recital he has chosen three sets of songs. Opening the concert will be one of a set of songs by Claude Debussy entitled F�tes Galantes, which is a setting of three 19th century poems by Paul Verlaine, each describing the pursuit of love by their subjects.

Then Andrew calls on five songs from Benjamin Britten, written in 1911 and grouped under the title On this Island. These too are settings of poems, this time by Britten’s friend and collaborator WH Auden. Given their progeny these songs are not surprisingly complex and subtle, a reflection of Auden’s command of language, whilst the music is restrained, at times severe, but reflecting the wide range of moods Auden presents.

The second half of the recital is given over entirely to one set of songs: Schubert’s incomparable Die Sch�ne M�llerin (the fair maid of the mill). In the 20 short songs, Schubert creates a literary and musical masterpiece as he describes the yearnings of the love-sick young miller, always accompanied in the background by the rumbling of the mill wheels or the burbling of the ever present brook.

It will be a delight in this recital too to hear Nicola Eimer once again in Sidmouth; on her last visit, her playing of Schubert’s piano works were described as “a pianistic exhibition of sheer grace and delicacy”.

The recital starts at 3pm and tickets at �12.50 are available at Paragon Books, High Street, Sidmouth, and other local outlets in the area. Enquires: 01395 514618. Euterpe