Album review: Mark Padmore, Morgan Szymanski, Alec Roth: Sometime I Sing (Signum Classics)

Best known for his Schubert lieder, tenor Mark Padmore here performs Alec Roth's arrangements of songs and poems for voice and guitar, ranging from a sequence of Thomas Wyatt poems of love lost, to the more reflective, crepuscular tone of modern verses on nocturnal themes by Vikram Seth.

Padmore's high, clear tone brings due courtly refinement to the former, including “Tell Me”, a discussion on female fidelity between the narrator and a robin, accompanied by Morgan Szymanski's delicate, springy guitar. Elsewhere, Padmore adopts a coyly dramatic delivery for a suite of five English folk songs, but is appropriately less animated for “Autumnal”, a lovely setting of John Donne's celebration of mature beauty.

Download: Autumnal; Tell Me; All You Who Sleep Tonight