Ian Bostridge and Xuefei Yang: Songs from Our Ancestors, Sam Wanamaker Theatre

As part of their new Concerts By Candelight series, the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse – the world’s only Jacobean-style indoor theatre – host tenor Ian Bostridge and classical guitar prodigy Xuefei Yang collaborate for an afternoon of songs that reflect their respective heritages. A selection of pieces by John Dowland and Franz Schubert will accompany Benjamin Britten’s Chinese and English folk settings and Dominick Argento’s Letters from Composers.

American Dominick Argento, now in his 87^th year, is one of the greatest living composers of vocal music. He is particularly acclaimed for setting unusual texts to music, with a mixture of conventional tonality and experimental atonal techniques. Letters from Composers(1968) is a case in point. Correspondence from Schubert, Chopin, Mozart and others are set for voice and guitar, echoing each composer’s style while sounding firmly Argento’s own.

Benjamin Britten’s songs have long been part of the twentieth century repertoire. His Songs of the Chinese, inspired by a 1956 trip to the Far East, forsake Orientalism to rather recapture the rhythmic texture and musical ideas of Chinese music. Franz Schubert is widely regarded as an unsurpassed composer of lied, while John Dowland’s seventeenth century pieces for voice and lute have an exquisite melancholy perfect for the Playhouse’s period surroundings.

Ian Bostridge came into music late, with a first recital at the age of 27. Since a 1994 performance of Schubert’s Winterreise, he has become the country’s pre-eminent lied-singer. His voice is strikingly elemental, without the smooth grace of many others singers. In the words of The Times, he is “thinking man’s tenor.” In contrast to Bostridge’s adult blossoming, Xuefei Yang was just 7 when she began to play classical guitar. Trained by the famed Chen Zhi at the age of 10, she already toured the world in her teenage years. Now a resident of London, her recordings and performances show an ever-evolving virtuosity, while her arrangements of Bach for the classical guitar have enriched her instrument’s repertoire. Her 2013 collaboration with Bostridge on Britten’s Songs of the Chinese drew ecstatic reactions, sure to be repeated in live performance.