Watching and waiting (but also doing as hard a day’s work as any singer who wishes to keep his voice), Mark Padmore must have wondered over recent years if he was forever to remain among the worthy but unrewarded ranks of those who ‘also serve’. His name has been familiar to us for 12 years at least. For as long it has featured on recordings, too, almost always gratefully acknowledged. But success on record is sealed with a recital; and here it is.

It is not always a bad thing to be kept waiting: the voice strengthens and the art matures. Padmore comes forward now in control of his voice more completely than he was just a few years ago – there are still occasionally high notes without resonance (in the familiar English fashion) and a trifle backward in production, but this is still a voice of youthful freshness, commanded with skill and assurance. The programme tests his musicianship very thoroughly, and it reveals also considerable powers of expressiveness, both forthright and subtle.

In Tippett’s cantata and Britten’s songs we can hardly help think of Peter Pears, for whom they were written. But Padmore does not evoke memories of that voice or manner: he sings, I would say, more in the way of Martyn Hill, who recorded Boyhood’s End for the composer’s 95th birthday, as Padmore and Roger Vignoles do now for his centenary. Finzi’s Hardy settings also had Hill as their singer some years ago, and the new performances will, I hope, commend them to a new generation.

They, on the other hand, may be interested primarily on account of Britten’s Who are these children? This is an unjustly neglected work, never recorded commercially by Britten and Pears though caught in an invaluable BBC transcript. It collects short, often enigmatic, poems by the Scot William Suter, and the settings are strong and haunting. They also go well with the Hölderlin fragments and Um Mitternacht. In all these, Vignoles is marvellously clear in notes (often fiendishly difficult) and rhythm, and he contributes an excellent essay.