Christine Brewer, Wigmore Hall

Christine Brewer singing American song – it’s like Judi Dench in Shakespeare, or an Aaron Sorkin screenplay: it just doesn’t get any better. Forcing the restrained acoustic of the Wigmore to ring as though it were St Paul’s, and persuading a white-haired Friday-night crowd to whoop and clap between numbers until cut off by the next piano introduction, it’s hard to say whether Brewer’s voice or personality carries greater weight. Every bit the equal of the “glad, great-throated nightingale” she sang of, her repertoire may have been from a bygone era but there was nothing dusty about this recital.

Partnered by Roger Vignoles (pictured below), Brewer revisited repertoire from her Echoes of Nightingales disc – American songs featured among the encores of the great sopranos. Turns out that the likes of Kirsten Flagstad, Helen Traubel and Eileen Farrell all indulged in some rather guilty post-programme bonbons, offered up here in a greedy feast of schmalz, sentiment and shameless emoting.

Before we could get to the hard stuff however, there was a first-half warm-up – 20th-century American repertoire of a rather more admissible, take-home-to-meet-the-parents variety. I struggle with Menotti, whose stylistic flexibility can too easily place him alongside Glazunov in the ranks of composers without a clear musical fingerprint. He is at his best in opera; his 1967 song cycle Canti della Lontananza lacks cohesion but – in Brewer’s hands – not impact. Great smears of colour from piano and voice brought a relaxed anarchy to the composer’s naturally smudgy harmonies, and his rather overwrought emotional landscape was given convincing scope in the secure extremities of Brewer’s range.

Continuing the theme of sufferings in love was Alan Smith’s Letters from George to Evelyn. Receiving its UK premiere, the cycle sets excerpts from the genuine World War Two correspondence between First Lieutenant George W Honts and his wife. Moving from lyric intensity (“My heart, my mind, my soul is yours”) to the bathos of the more mundane (“The order of the day is mud-mud-mud…”), it offers plenty of challenge even to Brewer’s range and technique. Most successful are its frequent passages of unaccompanied writing for voice, allowing the rather self-conscious word-painting to give way to a more interiorised, abstract approach. Brewer’s hearty lower range belies the floated control of the top, and both were required to characterise the rather stolid harmonic vocabulary.

Metaphorical mink slung about her shoulders, Brewer launched the diva selection of her second half with Ernest Charles’s once-classic encore “When I have sung my songs to you”. Languid and portamento-laden, it only required a quellazaire and chaise longue for full impact. We flirted with a folksier, more naïf sensibility for John La Montaine’s setting of “Stopping by woods on a snowy evening” – effortlessly (and not a bit bizarrely) transforming Frost’s elusive landscape into a plaid-shirted barn dance of a scene. Most delicious perhaps was the bluesy Americana of Harold Arlen’s “Happiness is a thing called Joe”. Crooning and caressing her way around such classic lines as “He’s got a smile that makes the lilacs wanna grow”, there was none of the awkward classical singer moonlighting in jazz here.

We finished with Celius Dougherty’s “Review”, a backbiting gem that has long been a staple of Brewer’s encore repertoire. Satirising a classic concert review (ahem), in earnest and pompous prose, we are guided through Miss Sadabelle Smith’s first New York recital. Cod-classical flourishes decorate mentions of style, ominous pedal points colour the second stanza shift in mood (“Unfortunately…”). Delighting in the opportunity to sing badly, Brewer gamely gave her best representations of poor breath control, nervousness and nasal tone, finally releasing into Miss Smith’s operatic triumph.

“God give me hills and strength to climb”. Quoting from Frank La Forge’s “Hills” (another of the second-half gems), Brewer commented, “That’s my kind of motto.” Last night’s programme may only have offered her musical hillocks, but these were scaled with joy and a command that was impossible to resist.

Watch Christine Brewer singing Lady Billows in Sante Fe Opera's production of Albert Herring

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