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                             NICKY SPENCE AND DYLAN PEREZ

                                           Royal Pump Rooms, Leamington Spa *****

 

Jetlag? What jetlag? Such was the exhilaration and emotional energy communicated by this captivating recital in the Leamington Music Festival 2026 it was difficult to credit that the singer had flown in overnight after performing in Paris and that the pianist had landed from New York that very morning.

This poignant, brilliantly-constructed programme devised by tenor Nicky Spence and accompanist Dylan Perez was all about the mystery of childhood and its relationship with the adult world, all inspired by their own much-loved son who has just reached his second birthday. Songs were selected because of the appositeness of their texts, Spence singing in a variety of languages, English, French, German, Russian, with several offerings in his beloved homeland Scots, and somehow all the key-changes dovetailed smoothly, with absolutely no jarring effects as the sequence progressed seamlessly.

Accordingly we were treated during this enchanting hour to a variety of musical styles, each requiring a different kind of delivery from Spence, who balanced and nuanced his voice to perfection in this close, intimate acoustic. I have heard his voice soar over vast operatic auditoria, but here it confided, addressing us all, with communicative eye- and body-language to complement.

The offerings were too many to mention, but outstanding were plenty of melismatic Britten with his particular affinity with childhood, a balletic Tchaikovsky “At the Ball”, Victoria Wood’s heartbreaking “Litter Bin”, the sweet head notes of Thomas Dunhill’s “The Cloths of Heaven” (never mind the now devalued closing lines by Yeats), and a world-stopping Mahler “Um Mitternacht”.

Dylan Perez was such a sympathetic and versatile accompanist, now deft and coruscating, now colourfully orchestral in his timbres drawn from the Fazioli piano. But his crowning moment came when he surprised us all with Frederic Rzewski’s “No Good” for speaking pianist, his own recitations, wide-eyed and ironic, accompanied by his vivid playing.

Christopher Morley

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