Autograph is a career-spanning seven-disc set personally selected by English tenor Ian Bostridge in celebration of his 50th birthday. Organised thematically, discs 1 and 2 cover the Lieder for which Bostridge is justly famous – Wolf, Schumann and Schubert, including Winterreise in its entirety. Discs 3 and 4 are devoted to early music, with a lengthy selection of excerpts from Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, and including briefer coverage of Dido and Aeneas, Mozart’s Idomeneo and Die Entführung aus dem Serail, plus a sprinkling of Handel.  Then it’s on to substantial excerpts from Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia, Billy Budd, and The Turn of the Screw, before returning to two complete Lieder cycles. In an usual pairing, Schumann’s Dichterliebe and Janácˇek’s The Diary of One Who Disappeared are bracketed together under ‘Allegories of Love,’ the rationale for which you can hear Bostridge discuss on the final disc, a lengthy (80 minutes!) interview.  It’s extraordinary for a singer to have such command of the differing vocal demands of repertoire covering four centuries, and if your early music preferences are with period performances, Bostridge’s readings may not quite be for you. He is especially good with Britten, and, not surprisingly, at his transcendental best with the…

The British tenor is the quintessential lieder singer. He shares his cerebral approach to song with Maxim Boon.

In this month’s issue, Beethoven’s Big Bang: the concert that changed everything.

Ian Bostridge may well be the busiest interpreter of Benjamin Britten in this the composer’s 100th birthday year. Previous recordings of Our Hunting Fathers and the Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings have demonstrated the English tenor’s sensitive characterisation of text, but this latest collection of song cycles, written for Britten’s partner and muse Peter Pears, is Bostridge’s finest and most compelling offering yet. A big part of that is Antonio Pappano’s accompaniment. The duo collaborated on a Schubert album, but the eccentricities of Britten’s piano writing – all angular figurations and chiaroscuro effects he put into play himself – allow his imagination, and fingers, to run wild, whether bright and brilliant or sparse and eerie. Both performers vary their touch and articulation judiciously for a disc that is alive at every moment, leaving you hanging off every word. Listen to the way Bostridge leans into dissonance, gouging the text of Before Life and After from the late cycle Winter Words. Or the cat-and-mouse runs passed between singer and pianist in the nursery rhyme-like Wagtail and Baby. Bostridge’s intonation and enunciation are faultless but never characterless; I particularly relish how he shapes drawn-out melismas such as the sweet-toned “Seraphim”. His…