Lieder, songs and sonnets: David Butt Philip in Vaughan Williams, Alma Mahler, Wagner & Britten at Wigmore Hall

David Butt Philip (Photo: Andrew Staples)

Ralph Vaughan Williams, Alma Mahler, Wagner, Britten: David Butt Philip, James Baillieu; Wigmore Hall
Reviewed 15 June 2025

In a rare song recital, the dramatic tenor explores a remarkably diverse yet imaginative programme that moved away from his opera repertory

Thanks to the vagaries of programming and that fact the much of his chosen operatic repertoire of Wagner and Richard Strauss is relatively rare on these shores at the moment, tenor David Butt Philip is only something of an occasional visitor to UK opera houses and concert halls. Even more so, the chance to catch him in recital in the relative intimacy of Wigmore Hall was something indeed.

On Sunday 15 June 2025, David Butt Philip was joined by pianist James Baillieu for a programme bookended by British song cycles setting sequences of sonnets. They began with Ralph Vaughan Williams' early The House of Life, setting sonnets by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and ended with Benjamin Britten's The Holy Sonnets of John Donne. In between the repertoire moved to dramatic settings of German with three songs by Alma Mahler and Wagner's Wesendonck Lieder.

RVW wrote The House of Life in 1903, roughly around the time he wrote his better known Songs of Travel. This is RVW before he went to study with Ravel and before English folksong began to make such a profound impression on him. This is the RVW whom Sir Charles Villiers Stanford thought was 'too Germanic' and who studied with Max Bruch as well. The House of Life is notable for the fact that the sequence includes Silent Noon, in fact the song was written before the rest and somehow RVW never quite achieves the same magic in the rest of the cycle. 

I have to confess that I have always found Rossetti's poems a bit too wordy for my taste, which means that RVW's settings require a very particular singer to bring off the cycle of six substantial songs. [Kitty Whately has recorded a notable version, see my review]. Here David Butt Philip made it clear that words were very important to him and significantly his diction was such that we never needed the printed words. Each song was a piece of convincing drama, and despite the rather conventional harmonies RVW's relatively free approach to the vocal line was in many ways rather forward looking. These songs are the antithesis of the conventional early 20th century lyrical English song.

Love-sight began with James Baillieu's gentle, tender piano and Butt Philip took advantage of his rich lower register to give us fine dark tone which led to a powerful climax. Emotions were riding high here, but the singer also modulated his voice beautifully. Silent Noon was serious and intent, intimate almost with burnished tone. The magical piano introduction to Love's Minstrels led to something spare and striking, whilst Heart's Haven had a slow build to it with powerfully committed climaxes. Death in Love was gripping for Butt Philip's storytelling rather than particular musical values, then we ended with Love's last gift, perhaps a slightly curious song but one to which both performers gave real commitment and conviction.

In complete contrast, we heard three substantial songs by Alma Mahler where her approach combined freedom and drama, and allowed Butt Philip and Baillieu to create three strongly dramatic scenas. Hymne was almost conversationally Expressionist. The vocal line had a freedom to it and Butt Philip's performance really followed the words as the music was by turns dark, vivid, impulsive and intense. Ekstase was vibrant and strong, full of large scale emotions, and then Der Erkennende (setting a poem by Franz Werfel who would be one of Alma Mahler's later husbands) moved from quiet intensity to rhapsodic power. 

For the only time during the evening, these songs allowed David Butt Philip to let rip with the sort of finely focused power that he uses in opera. But whatever he was singing, it was notable that both words and sense of line were paramount, this was a song recital not an opera recital manqué.

Wagner's Wesendonck Lieder are notable because together with the Siegfried Idyll, they are the two non-operatic works by Wagner most regularly performed, but also because they are his only mature set of songs. Wagner wrote them for female voice and piano and only ever orchestrated one, for chamber forces. The version we know and love was done after Wagner's death by Felix Mottl. Wagner wrote them in 1858/59 and promptly sold them to the publisher Schott! There is also the issue of whether the songs were intended as a cycle, or are simply a group of settings of Mathilde Wesendonck's poems.

Der Engel began in quite an interior way with emphasis on line and phrasing, whilst Stehe still! was in complete contrast with a vivid torrent of words and real sense of drama leading to affirmation at the end that seemed rather undercut by the piano postlude. Im Treibhaus, one of the songs with a clear link to Tristan & Isolde began in hauntingly plangent fashion and I was rather impressed at the way Butt Philip seemed to be able to draw deep meaning out of Wesendonck's words. There was real power and strength in Schmerzen whilst Träume began with real piano magic from James Baillieu. Butt Philip was quite contained here, bringing out a sense of the words rather than relying on the sheer beauty of voice.

These songs were a welcome chance to hear David Butt Philip in more intimate Wagner, and to relish his and James Baillieu's commitment to the deeper meanings in the songs.

We ended with Britten's The Holy Sonnets of John Donne, written in 1945 for himself and Peter Pears to perform. The work's premier came after the premier of his opera Peter Grimes transformed his reputation, yet the music was also influenced by his performance visit to the liberated Bergen-Belsen concentration camp with Yehudi Menuhin. These songs represent a consistently coruscating coming together of major composer and major poet in way that the RVW settings of Rossetti only intermittently achieved. I have to confess that hearing David Butt Philip in these songs made me wonder about hearing him in Britten's operatic repertoire and I hope some British opera companies take note.

Oh my black Soule! began strong and stark, yet heroic with Butt Philip making the vocal line really vibrant until the more intimate sections. Batter my heart was fast and impulsive, driving on in a way that reflected the opening line. Oh might those sighs and teares combined plangent tone with an insistency in the way Britten used the repeated notes and phrases, yet ending hauntingly intense. Oh, to vex me was vividly impulsive, ending with memorable melismatic passages. What if this present moved between starkness and dark intensity, Since she whom I loved was more intimate and lyrical, quiet, contained yet intense. At the round earth's imagined corners returned us to vivid projection of Donne's meaning, and here and elsewhere I was impressed by the way Butt Philip conveyed the meaning and sense of Donne's long sentences. Thou has made me began strongly and continued inexorably, yet we ended with the serious voice of Death, be not proud, truly uncompromising at the end.

We stayed with Britten for an encore, his version of O waly, waly.

There is another chance to hear David Butt Philip in recital as part of Opera Holland Park's Opera in Song series when he joins baritone Julien Van Mellaerts and pianist Dylan Perez on 21 June [further details].

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