Annika Lindskog and Steve Copeland at Lunchtime Live !

 Annika Lindskog and Steve Copeland, Portsmouth Cathedral, Jan 22

One can still expect a sizeable audience for a Messiah, Vivaldi by Candlelight or Songs from the Shows but a programme of 'English and Nordic art songs on the theme of solitude, meetings and togetherness' of a damp January Thursday lunchtime is a bit more niche. Thus it was good to see a reasonable turnout (both in numbers and mindset) for Annika Lindskog and Steve Copeland.

Samuel Barber's Promiscuity was a brief, ethereal fragment to begin, followed by the almost as austere, lingering Desire for Hermitage. If Flickan kom ifrån sin älsklings möte by Sibelius next up was a degree or two more rhapsodic, it was almost so by default but by then one was tuned into the deeply meditative mood.

James MacMillan's Ballad was audibly Scottish and thus as much Nordic as English, with Steve's atmospheric, minimal accompaniment allowing Annika's voice to make full use of the acoustic in St. Thomas's chapel. Finzi's Come away, death completed a first section with more melancholy before Steve explained- for the benefit of the musically illiterate like me- that a shift from 'the misery of B minor to the uplands of E major' introduced a happier middle section. Except Bach's B minor Mass at least begins so rousingly. There is no point trying to explain key signatures to me. You'd be better off trying to teach chess to a cat.

So, pieces by Roger Quilter, Grieg and the plangent setting of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Silent Noon by Vaughan Williams made for some mild sunlight before a final section of crepuscular, elegiac songs by Gunnar de Frumerie, another by Vaughan Williams and the restrained wonder of King David by Herbert Howells, in which he,

     rose; and in his garden
Walked by the moon alone
A nightingale hidden in a cypress tree
Jargoned on and on. 

Always glad to be introduced to a composer one hadn't known about, like de Frumiere, it's also exactly right to end on a piece that can't be followed, that incidentally makes one think that Walter de la Mare's currently unfashionable status as a poet is due some reconsideration. 

No big, noisy ending but ending on a high nonetheless. Thoughtful and classy. 

I've been hearing on the wireless about how a 'new world order' is set to carve up the world and it would certainly threaten much that we've always valued if it came about. Exquisite afternoons such as this afternoon, for example. I'm glad I was there, just in case.