Stories from England

British tenor Ian Bostridge is known worldwide as one of the most fascinating singers of our time. ‘He is a story-teller and a singing-actor par excellence, with an immense range of emotional expression’, wrote the London Evening Standard about this PhD historian who studied at Cambridge and Oxford. Together with Belgian chamber music ensemble Oxalys, Bostridge embarks on a journey through the lovely landscapes of his native England with English music from the Belle Époque by Ralph Vaughan Williams, Peter Warlock, and Gustav Holst. 

Around the year 1900, skirts swished across European ballrooms, and Mata Hari danced in the Parisian salons frequented by literary giants like Oscar Wilde and musical innovators like Claude Debussy. In the music of conservative England, where everything is always done differently, the serene atmosphere of rural tranquillity set the tone. Ian Bostridge has the ideal golden serrated timbre for the British romanticism of Gustav Holt and Ralph Vaughan Williams. He also sings songs by the lesser-known Peter Warlock, who was inspired by music from the time of Queen Elizabeth I, but also embraced Debussy’s harmonies.