A former Oxford choral scholar – though he hardly sounds like one – Stuart Jackson has made his mark on disc as a sturdy Mozart tenor with Ian Page’s Classical Opera Company (Zaide, 10/16; Il sogno di Scipione, 10/17 – both Signum). In partnership with the ever-sensitive Jocelyn Freeman, Jackson proves just as persuasive in the Britten items that open this recital. He saltily savours the ‘increasing dottiness’ (the composer’s words) of Motteux’s text in the rollicking Purcell arrangement ‘Man is for the woman made’; and encouraged by Freeman’s limpid touch, he finely captures the changing moods of the canticle My beloved is mine, from impassioned declamation to the stillness of ‘He is my Altar’ and the quiet rapture of the close. A lovely performance, this.

Reservations creep in with the German songs. Skilfully as Jackson negotiates the coiled lines of Britten’s ‘Um Mitternacht’, I miss a close engagement with Goethe’s subtle text. His German, while correct enough, sounds slightly too casual, here and in the Wolf and Schumann. Freeman is exemplary, whether taking the lead or in discreet support. But after her magical introduction to Wolf’s ‘Verschwiegene Liebe’, Jackson seems matter-of-fact. While his tone falls agreeably on the ear, I hear little inner intensity in the Tristanesque elegy of ‘Peregrina’, no twinkle of humour in a po-faced ‘Nimmersatte Liebe’, no sense of transcendence at the mystical close of ‘An die Geliebte’. And at this dogged tempo the potentially ecstatic ‘Widmung’ remains earthbound.

In Liszt’s Petrarch Sonnets – probably written as a salon showcase for the great Rubini – Jackson has the right sort of voice and the right instincts. Unfurling an operatic fullness of tone, he is exciting, if slightly relentless, in declamatory mode, fearlessly nailing the top Bs and D flats of Liszt’s high alternatives. Where bel canto sweetness is called for, above all in the third sonnet, he is merely pleasant. Compare him with Matthew Polenzani (Hyperion, 1/11), who shades and caresses the Bellinian lines with an ideal liquid legato. In the disc’s English envoi, Denis Browne’s languorously elegant ‘To Gratiana dancing and singing’, Jackson is again wholly in his element, with the same care for the colour and meaning of words as in his Britten. Perhaps I’ve been unfairly Beckmesserish. Jackson’s healthy tenor and fine musical instincts are a pleasure in themselves. Yet on this evidence his Lieder-singing remains work in progress.