Ian Bostridge
Posted in Classical on Jul 11th, 2008 4 Comments »
Wigmore Hall used to run lunchtime concerts where new young musical talent got the opportunity to perform in public. Entrance fee was nominal, and the audience would normally be not much more than a hundred including Mums and Dads and the rest of the family.
In April 1993 I strayed in during a damp lunch hour. The concert started with a chamber group of young instrumentalists. Their first piece was a new modern work – all squeaks and bumps and farts and sounds of scraping wire – and no worse than others I had “listened” to by more eminent figures, such as Pierre Boulez. They also did the Siegfried Idyll – a lovely, gentle piece belying Wagner’s image as bombastic and overbearing.
In between there was a young singer, a tenor. He was thin and a little gaunt, angular, all knees and elbows. He sang Mahler’s “Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen”. I have the image of him now, in my mind’s eye, body thrust forward, singing full of passion, without inhibition, lovely clear voice, especially at the top (a touch weaker at the baritone end of things in the last song). There was something so utterly English about him; almost innocence. His hands and arms seemed to move involuntarily with his singing, as part of its expressiveness. It was forceful and vigorous. It was Ian Bostridge’s debut.
Several weeks later I was flicking through the channels on the wireless and, by chance, came across a commercial music station, which usually played Easy Listening, broadcasting the very lunchtime concert I had been to at Wigmore Hall. I taped it. Here, from my tape, is Ian Bostridge singing the third song in the cycle “Ich hab ein gluhend Messer in meiner Brust”.
Written and sung by Kate Rusby, from her last album “Awkward Annie”. She is accompanied by John McCusker, her former husband. Their separation was painful. 
