Hugh Cutting/Re-Establishment Review – The countertenor’s engaging recitation is imaginative fun | classical music

HThe cut is still sometimes described as a rising countertenor. That should certainly now be unconditional. The rate of discount has gone almost to the top, and 2025 has been an excellent year. This enthusiastically performed and received concert, a world off the beaten track of pre-Christmas parties or countertenor gigs, accompanied by the eclectically matched eight-strong Refound Ensemble, showed why.

Themed parties are commonplace, but Cutting’s program of songs and music, all linked to the night’s theme, is built on levels of thought and performative imagination that few such programs attempt, let alone achieve. The pieces ranged from the baroque to the completely new, via Schubert, folk song and Don McLean. A few familiar pieces were played on the program as written, with Cutting’s arrangements mostly preferred by the group members. It was compelling from start to finish, more cabaret than concert.

The calm and magic of the night came first. However, even here, there was immediate authenticity in the lit Auden scene of Geoffrey Burgogne, once famous for the Nunc Dimittis from the Le Carré adaptations broadcast by the BBC in the 1970s. Then, without interruption, as was the case for most of the programme, we heard Endymion’s soulful aria to the moon from Cavalli’s La Calisto and Purcell’s Fairy Queen serenading the pleasures of the night, for which the brilliant countertenor was a perfect fit.

Of the two premieres, Pierce Connor Kennedy’s Morpheus, Rupert Brooke’s dark and expressive setting, was particularly successful, clearly scored and sung with gentle subtlety. Elena Langer’s “Fantastic Beasts”, settings of medieval lyrics about birds and beasts, bound by virtuoso clarinet playing by Magdalena Krzystevska, were more whimsical and whimsical, but very disjointed.

Oberon “Hello, wanderer!” From Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream was done with a wonderful arrangement that captured all the discordant strangeness of the score. Then comes a darker and more dramatic turn, as Schubert’s “Erlkönig” and Richard Rodney Bennett’s “Baby, Baby, Naughty Baby” both unleash unsettling nocturnal demons. Don McLean’s gentle 1970 ballad Vincent, sung in baritone by Cutting, treads the same knife-edge in a different way. The dark humor of William Bolcom’s outrageous Black Max was wonderfully executed, and Weill’s Speak Low was a seductive reminder at the end that the night is also made for love.