By John Gough

Mark Stone’s baritone voice seems to have increased in size since I last heard him, and even in the accommodating acoustic of Tardebigge Church his delivery of ‘The Vagabond’, the opening song of Vaughan Williams’ ‘Songs of Travel’, although suitably manly, was a bit too beefy for these surroundings. As things progressed he succeeded in reining it in, so that successive songs acquired legato lines and affecting tenderness.

Rising young composer Toby Young’s new work Freedom, a Tardebigge commission, was written as a companion piece for the Vaughan Williams. Its three songs with spare but idiomatic piano writing proved accessible and moving. The first playfully extolled the virtues of being young and carefree, the second, a fast and energetic Stevenson setting of Travel recalled the opening song of Ravel’s Shéhérazade in mood, if only in its ecstatic desire for foreign experiences. The beautiful and intense final setting of Rossetti’s Uphill took us into the unknown region – a spiritual and uncertain metaphorical journey through life. Many questions, but few answers here, as a gradual release of harmonic tension in the unwinding piano postlude brought the cycle to a magical end.

Stone has been here before with Dominic Argento’s remarkable and powerful piece The Andrée Expedition, which blurs the distinction between song cycle and dramatic work, (Argento called it a monodrama) and which chronicles a doomed Polar expedition by balloon. Once again this was a vivid tour de force, sung from memory and engaging from start to finish.

Sholto Kynoch produced atmospheric and beautifully paced and balanced playing in the demanding accompaniment, ranging from icy decoration in the limping dance of “Pride and ambition” to the frozen barcarolle of Hallucinations, while Stone’s blanched white voice which characterised the final etiolated words of the cycle produced a long silence which no-one dared to break for many long seconds.