Review: York Late Music, Christopher O’Gorman and Kate Ledger, Unitarian Chapel, St Saviourgate, York, August 4

A RECITAL involving a tenor and a pianist is normally a duo between the two. You do not expect to be talking about the pianist as the protagonist, with the tenor as an also-ran.

Christopher O’Gorman has a distinguished record as a choral and ensemble singer. His light tenor and straight tone are ideal for choral groups or early music, but I remain to be convinced that solo contemporary music is really his scene.

Most of the piano roles in the five works chosen – with the glowing exception of Britten’s Winter Words – were both detailed and forceful. Kate Ledger has considerable facility around the keyboard and played some tricky stuff with exemplary clarity, but in Sadie Harrison’s Easter Zunday (sic), setting the Dorset dialect of William Barnes, O’Gorman’s projection could not match its forceful staccato accompaniment.

Balance between voice and piano was altogether better in the Britten. Although still using a score, O’Gorman delivered his best here, including some nice legato lines, but he rarely gave the texts enough emphasis.

I enjoyed the echoes between voice and piano in James Cave’s raga-based In Your Old Age, setting a Shash Trevett poem. Accompaniments in three of Steve Crowther’s four settings from Helen Cadbury’s Forever, Now were percussive and words again blurred; the last song was a pleasing exception, the voice imaginatively treated. An operatic singer might have suited Dove’s Out Of Winter, although it conjured well-varied moods.

Martin Dreyer

Kate Ledger will appear as a soloist for York Late Music on September 1; visit latemusic.org for more details.