<i>Sally Matthews/ Thomas Allen</i> | Wigmore Hall, London
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Your support makes all the difference.Nothing could be more personal than a voice and, inevitably, how you respond to a particular singer has a lot to do with chemistry, or taste. The soprano Sally Matthews won the Kathleen Ferrier award last year and gave her prizewinner's recital last Thursday - which is a bit confusing, because this year's winner, announced in April, was a very different sort of soprano, Gillian Keith, who will give her recital next year.
Nothing could be more personal than a voice and, inevitably, how you respond to a particular singer has a lot to do with chemistry, or taste. The soprano Sally Matthews won the Kathleen Ferrier award last year and gave her prizewinner's recital last Thursday - which is a bit confusing, because this year's winner, announced in April, was a very different sort of soprano, Gillian Keith, who will give her recital next year.
Matthews was only 23 years old when she won, and was praised for "superb vocal grooming and real performance skills". On Thursday she wore a figure-hugging white dress with a gold bolero and looked like an ice-cream. Some would say her voice was creamy, too, though I could sit in a café all afternoon with some critics and disagree with everything they said. I would call this voice a hoot, and the wide-ranging opening song of Britten's On This Island exposed inconsistent tone quality which had nothing to do with expression.
After a while, I got used to it, or Matthews warmed up, and in some settings of Emily Dickinson by Julian Philips, she certainly showed a confident sense of humour. Her French, though, was woolly in songs by Enescu, and oddly enough, it was Strauss's very difficult Ophelia Lieder that really got her voice working flexibly and showed she could act with it. A lot of the credit was due to her pianist, John Cameron, who precisely created a mood of strangeness. In fact, his playing was a pleasure throughout the evening - clean, light and alert.
More often than not, pianists partnering singers are too reticent. But on Sunday, Roger Vignoles was actually a bit too loud for Thomas Allen's intimate style throughout the Fauré songs in the first half of their recital. Sir Thomas sang from music, which shouldn't be an issue, but may just have taken the edge off his projection. His French is good, he lightened his rich baritone effectively, and he wasn't tempted to overdo his interpretations, but sometimes he almost seemed to be singing to himself.
Balance wasn't a problem in Ravel's Histoires naturelles, because the vividly descriptive piano parts are distinct from the declamatory vocal line, and the humour of the words brought out Allen's histrionic gifts. But it was his encore, the first of Ravel's Don Quichotte songs - the only thing he sang from memory - where at last he seemed free.
The next recital in the Wigmore Hall's Fauré series is given by Christopher Maltman and Malcolm Martineau on Friday at 7.30pm. Box office: 020-7935 2141
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