Young Peter Pears comes to mind (not always happily) during this recital that finds tenor Thomas Michael Allen out of his Baroque opera element and in a wide range of vocal and dramatic thickets that he navigates with variable success. His upper range is distinctively coloured but his middle voice sounds fragile, even unsupported, and the lower range can be almost completely devoid of tension.

Such problems matter less when Allen is engaged by the texts of Britten’s Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo (with music playing to young Pears’s limited strengths at that stage in his vocal career) and, later in the recital, in selections from Eisler’s Hollywood Songbook. Comparisons in the Zemlinsky Walzergesänge with the more vocally solid Teodora Gheorghiu (Aparté, 9/13) show how the less imposing Allen can bring the listener closer to the song if only because there’s less voice acting as a medium between audience and composer. That’s also somewhat the case with Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte, an important but slender composition that benefits from not being oversold by a larger voice.

Less fortunately, the Fauré set sounds self-conscious; and as good as it is to hear Barber’s seldom-sung Mélodies passagères, Allen’s careful enunciation and vocalism impose a sameness on every phrase. His attacks have very little variation and tend to be uniformly soft, never really announcing a phrase. In the trio of Kurt Weill Broadway songs, one need not be attached to high-octane voices like Liza Minnelli’s to be puzzled over Allen’s blandness. Was he connecting at all with what he was singing? Pianist Charles Spencer does, with some particularly sympathetic work in the Britten, also adapting so skilfully to the Beethoven cycle you wonder if he’d switched to fortepiano.