It has almost become a rite of passage for English tenors to record Britten’s orchestral song-cycles. Mark Padmore has held off for longer than most but the wait has been worth it. These performances of the Serenade for tenor, horn and strings and the Nocturne are of the utmost sensitivity, skilfully accompanied by the Britten Sinfonia and recorded with tremendous presence.

‘On a poet’s lips I slept,’ sings Padmore at the start of the Nocturne, and that is just how it seems in these intimate and poetic performances. From the opening Charles Cotton poem of the Serenade, spoken with perfect naturalness, to the Shakespeare sonnet that closes the Nocturne, the sense of the poems comes across with extra immediacy, as if Padmore has read the texts many times over before fitting them to the music. There is much beauty here – not perhaps in the purely vocal sense that one hears it in the sadly missed Rolfe Johnson (at times Padmore is holding at bay an incipient fast vibrato) but in the marriage of words and music, accompanied by clean and taut playing throughout from the Britten Sinfonia and, in particular, Stephen Bell, the horn soloist in the Serenade. The still authoritative Pears and Britten, by comparison, work on an altogether bigger scale.

Rather than completing the disc with Les illuminations, which is the obvious third choice, Padmore has turned to Finzi’s Dies Natalis, to which he brings the same rapt concentration and verbal detail. This is again a lightly sung performance, helped by the way the Britten Sinfonia scales back where necessary, aspiring to the intimacy that distinguishes so much of this disc. Highly recommended.