A lot will depend on your reaction to Brian Asawa’s voice: it is high, light and sweet, and is produced with remarkable evenness, but it seems to have little weight or attack – this may be emphasized or exaggerated by a close recording. His diction, aided by that recording, is crystal-clear, but he suggests little feeling for words in any of the four languages here. Nor is his a particularly masculine sound; Asawa could easily be taken for a brightish mezzo with a prominent but not uncontrolled vibrato. You might find such a voice more suited to this repertoire than the more obviously male and more obviously alto voices of many other countertenors, but the repertoire introduces another problem, to me an insuperable one.
In small print on the back of the jewel-case appears the phrase ‘Orchestral arrangements Jonathan Tunick’. Everything here is arranged, often very sumptuously and sweetly indeed. Even the Villa-Lobos ‘Aria’, originally for voice and eight cellos, is equipped not only with extra instruments but with extra counterpoints and a bumbling extra bass-line; I found it very hard indeed to listen to this to the end. Rachmaninov is turned into Tchaikovsky, Faure is cocooned in spun sugar and Medtner’s intensely idiomatic keyboard parts are ruined by insensitive lushness. Faure’s Pavane is sung as a wordless vocalise – the accompanying notes refer to this, without justification as ‘the first, textless version’ – and although the same notes imply that all six movements of Medtner’s Suite-Vocalise are recorded here, only one of them is.
Personally I do not like Asawa’s sound very much – when hearing a mezzo voice I prefer one with more guts and substance to it – but I can imagine enjoying it in, say, the renaissance or baroque repertory. Cushioned in an orchestrator’s upholstery, however, yet oddly detached from that background by the recording, his weightless sweetness seemed to me slightly absurd and more than slightly repellent.'