Mark Padmore, Kristian Bezuidenhout: Beethoven, Haydn, Mozart | Album Review

As a composer of songs,Schubert was such a gamechanger that his output has tended to overshadow even the songs of precursors as great as Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. Here tenor Mark Padmore and fortepianist Kristian Bezuidenhout tackle 15 of the earlier composers' works (among them Haydn's She never told her love, Mozart's Das Veilchen and an idealistic, arresting late Masonic cantata, and Beethoven's An die ferne Geliebte) with a freshness that has an air of artistic restoration. Padmore's normal mode, often vibrato-free, is of such an intimacy that he might almost be addressing his beguiling, carefully contoured delivery to you alone. With such detail and depth, you imagine, he could make a telephone directory interesting.