Try as I may, I couldn’t find any artistic plan or logic behind the choice of items for this oddly compiled recital or its ordering, German, French, English and Russian arias mixed haphazardly. Skovhus starts with a soft landing, a sentimental aria from Korngold, who is now being grossly overrated. At least it serves to show off the seductive sound of the baritone’s quieter singing. So, in the succeeding French section, do Hamlet’s “Comme une pale fleur” and Valentin’s famous cavatine, line smooth, French excellent, an attempt, in the case of the Danish prince, to get inside the character that is carried forward into the long extract from Don Carlos, commendably done in French.
In the other three excerpts from Thomas’s opera we hear the downside of the baritone’s singing, also disclosed in Posa’s death throes, a feeling that he is blowing up his tone beyond its natural limits. Comparison comes to mind with Thomases, Allen and Hampson, and they aren’t flattering to the newcomer in this territory. Or indeed in the role of Wolfram with, say, Eberhard Waechter from the recent past whose voice, very similar to that of Skovhus, copes more naturally and smoothly with Wolfram’s grateful musings. Skovhus’s Budd is appealing, though not as idiomatic as Allen’s. His grainy tone really comes into its own in the roles of Onegin and Yeletsky, where his impassioned singing is very much of the essence, although again the desire to sacrifice even line to dramatic meaning mars the easy flow of Yeletsky’s outpouring of love for Lisa.
Conlon and the ENO Orchestra manage to command the idiom and mood of all the music in hand. The recording is spacious and well balanced. Whoever wrote the resume of each plot seems hazy about motivation. In Budd, Vere does have a choice over condemning Billy to death: that choice lies at the very heart of the work. Onegin is not haughty in his dismissal of Tatyana; quite the contrary, he is kind and avuncular.'