Richar Lewis: The Great Welsh Tenor - Handel arias and British folksongs Regis RRC1375 [JW] : Classical Music Reviews

Richard Lewis was almost as much associated with the role of Gerontius as his great predecessor, Heddle Nash. Lewis went one better than Nash, though, in one respect, recording the work twice, first with Sargent and then with Barbirolli. He also recorded much Handel with Sargent including complete, or as-good-as-complete (for the time) recordings of Israel in Egypt, Acis and Galatea and Messiah. This Regis disc disinters the separate Handel arias album he made with Sargent in 1957, and adds the Folksongs disc made the following year with Charles Mackerras.

The Handel arias were plumped out, bedecked in rich panoply – Sargent’s own work I assume – that even then might have seen as a little over-romanticised. After all, Anthony Bernard, Boyd Neel, Arnold Goldsbrough and Anthony Lewis, amongst others, had been ploughing the field of smaller-scale, more incisively rhythmic baroque performances for quite some time. This, however, was not Sargent’s thing, and one must accept the plush, Rolls Royce accompaniments for what they are.

Lewis sings ardently and imaginatively. Sometimes there are over-emphases, as occasionally in the aria from Joshua, While Kedron’s brook. Waft her, angels is beautifully done, and it suits the voice, though one can’t really be persuaded that he reaches the peaks of intimacy and loss that Nash had before him. For ever blessed, again from Jephtha, is warmly sung, but Sargent tends to jog-trot through War, he sung, is toil and trouble, which is a pity as it’s slightly unusual repertoire to sing, for the time, and comes from Alexander’s Feast. Sound an alarm lacks the clarion call of another of his tenorial predecessors, Walter Widdop, who sounds as if he damn well meant it, but Lewis is a touch gentlemanly about it all; it’s more of a question than a command.

The Folksongs were arranged by one ‘Dorumsgaard’. Suspicious minds might think it was a pseudonym for Mackerras who did quite a bit of this sort of thing at around this time, but it must be Arne Dorumsgaard, who was a prolific arranger and who also composed. An awful lot of British singers essayed this sort of repertoire one way or another; one thinks of Alfred Deller singing I will give my love an apple, for example, or Wilfred Brown who sang David of the White Rock (in English; Lewis sings it in Welsh, very properly as a Mancunian Welshman), and Bingo. Again, though, these Dorumsgaard arrangements, like Sargent’s, are a bit broad brush and artful, and are at their best when they simmer down and have the confidence to suggest gently.

Ar hyd y nos (All through the night) is very beautiful, and shows Lewis’s unstrained legato; it’s taken very slowly. His humour shines through in King Arthur’s servants, and elsewhere he sings with sincerity and directness, in English, Welsh and Gaelic. His head voice is put to good effect too, not least in O love, it is a killing thing.

An almost-exactly similar compilation, including the entire Handel arias disc, and almost all the same folksongs, is out on Dutton CDCLP4003. It’s much to be preferred to Regis’s release, being more detailed, and with better spatial separation. There’s also, from time to time, some strange distortion on the Regis – notably Sound an Alarm. So if you want Lewis in this repertoire, stick with Dutton.

Jonathan Woolf

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