Requiem : The pity of war

"Recording of the week: The three Wunderhorn songs are the highlight of the album for me, though I suspect that they're also the tracks which will really polarise listeners: this is where Bostridge pushes the voice to its absolute limits, flattening the tone and leaving high notes exposed and raw as Mahler's terrified little drummer-boy and mortally wounded soldier live out their final, agonising moments ... Like the album as a whole, it's by no means an easy listen - but nor should it be".

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"Putting together a song recital to mark today's Armistice centenary is no easy task - few art songs came directly from the horrors of the trenches - but the work of two composers killed in the conflict, one English, one German, finds its way on to a moving new release from tenor Ian Bostridge ... Butterworth's settings of AE Housman's A Shropshire Lad are well known and welcome here, but not so familiar is Rudi Stephan's startlingly sensuous Ich will dir singen ein Hohelied, a cycle of erotic love songs far more radical than Butterworth's nostalgic pastoralism".

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"Bostridge and Antonio Pappano are on superb form here, carefully responsive to style and mood, yet striving throughout for unsparing immediacy of expression ... Stephan's taxing vocal lines push Bostridge to his limits in places, though the atmosphere of sensual introversion is finely sustained ... The Wunderhorn songs find Bostridge at his most expressionist ... A disc of great power and intelligence, it's both haunting and undeniably strong".