Neil Mackie's recording of Britten's Serenade—''not important stuff, but quite pleasant'' was how the composer described this masterpiece in 1943!—is a real winner. He has inherited the Pears style without the mannerisms (and without Pears's insights into darker aspects of the work) his voice is clear, sweet and firm throughout its compass; and diction is perfect. I regard this as easily the finest recorded performance of the work since Pears and Britten last recorded it for Decca, when the horn player was Barry Tuckwell, as here. Horn players must be tired of being told they do not surpass Dennis Brain, but none of them does, and superbly as Tuckwell plays, especially in this latest recording, he does not quite bring the same magic to the Prologue and Epilogue. Under Steuart Bedford, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra strings (led by the late and lamented John Tunnell) are both agile and sensitive, the ''Dirge'' being given a particularly atmospheric performance. Recording is clear and bright.
Of special interest is the inclusion on the disc of several Britten 'discoveries', chief among them the setting of Tennyson's Now sleeps the crimson petal, which was intended for the Serenade but was omitted presumably because it does not fit the general mood of the cycle. As Donald Mitchell and Philip Reed point out, its rocking accompaniment is nearer to the mood of the Nocturne of 1958. It is an exquisitely beautiful song and one hopes that there will be an arrangement with piano accompaniment to give it wider circulation, otherwise performances will inevitably be few.
Also here are Britten's orchestral realizations of six Purcell songs for Orpheus Britannicus, sung with style and fervour by Mackie, and his orchestral accompaniments for Schubert's Die Forelle and Schumann's Fruhlingsnacht, dating probably from 1942 and utterly delightful. The Rossini Suite of 1935 was written for a GPO documentary film. Only three of the five movements were used and Britten re-scored some of them and added others for his well-known Soirees musicales. Here are the originals, though, with linking cadenzas and a boys' choir in ''La danza''. They are wholly engaging and performed with sparkle. No Brittenite should be without this treasurable disc, in which Mackie's singing of The Bonny Earl o' Moray is a special bonus.
Elisabeth Soderstrom's singing of Our Hunting Fathers is brilliant and dramatic, as befits this amazing work which still sounds startlingly radical over 50 years after its first performance. This highly-charged and well-recorded performance sounds fine on CD, as does the Tear/Marriner Serenade. This tenor is at his best in this work in his recording with Giulini on DG, but a drawback there is the inflation of the string complement.'