Roderick Williams’s songs of England

Baritone Roderick Williams is on to a winner. In January, he appeared at Wigmore Hall with an acclaimed song cycle that interpolated English and Irish art songs into Schubert’s Winterreise. Last week, he returned, only this time taking the same composer’s Die schöne Müllerin as his starting point. Whereas January’s recital was wreathed in winter introspection, here we began in the sunniest optimism as a young man sets out on an adventure that will lead him to discover that lovely maiden of the mill – and much else besides.

This engaging innovation saw Schubert’s Das Wandern followed immediately by George Butterworth’s Loveliest of Trees, as the traveller plunges into the woods to gaze transfixed at the glories of spring. Pianist Susie Allan found just the right atmosphere for Joan Trimble’s silvern Green Rain, before propelling Vaughan Williams’s The Vagabond along his dusty road.

This recital, entitled Love Flows as the Brook Flows, centred on the wanderer’s constant companion that bubbles along in the accompaniment of several of these songs. Its presence ties the recital together, further strengthened by Williams’s straightforward desire to communicate directly with the audience. There were a few mock gasps from the stalls when he announced he would be singing the Schubert in English (in Jeremy Sams’s freewheeling translation), but it made perfect sense. You can’t go switching in and out of languages and hope to maintain a complete sense of narrative.

Williams is an entertainer. He interjects amusing updates on the naive young man’s progress as he falls for the miller’s daughter. And this imaginative vehicle gives him the opportunity to share some lesser-known 20th-century songs, such as Ina Boyle’s mystical A Song of Enchantment, or Gerald Finzi’s Overlooking the River, in his smooth, beautifully controlled baritone. Michael Head’s hymn to nature, Tewkesbury Road, was a delightful discovery, as was Roger Quilter’s charming miniature, Brown Is My Love.

Williams was only occasionally overwhelmed by the piano, as in Schubert’s Der Jäger. The macho man who stamps on the hopes of the wanderer was just a little too macho here, but moments later we heard of quiet disillusion and resignation in Finzi’s bleak He Abjures Love. Williams plainly adores this music, while Allan made the most of the lush piano writing.

The recital was given as the 2026 Jacqueline du Pré charity concert, staged annually in memory of the cellist by the Royal Society of Musicians, a body established in 1738 by Handel and others to support fellow artists who suffer hardship. Its services have never been more needed than now, with 732 grants made to 518 musicians last year.

Williams appears with pianist Christopher Glynn at the Lighthouse in Poole on 29 April with his Winterreise English song cycle. Get there if you can – and hope he encores with Madeleine Dring’s Take, O Take Those Lips Away. As he said: it’s an absolute banger.

Photograph by Darius Weinberg/Wigmore Hall