James Lomas and Benjamin Newlove at Lunchtime Live!

 James Lomas and Benjamin Newlove, Portsmouth Cathedral, Mar 10

It was a fine, bright day in March and the clock had just struck 13.00 when I went through the glass doors into Portsmouth Cathedral. James Lomas and Benjamin Newlove presented a set of English C20th song, James's baritone powerful enough to fill a much bigger space then the intimate St. Thomas's Chapel and Benjamin's piano accompaniment adding softer poetry.

Vaughan Williams is elegiac and pastoral in Love-Sight, Silent Noon and Tired but that was not until James had been an indomitable life-force in The Vagabond. One is tempted to take a short cut on the two with text by Christina Rossetti and find Benjamin's playing 'pre-Raphaelite'.

A chill wind blows through much of Benjamin Britten's music and Look! Through the Port from Billy Budd is a sparer, more modernist English than Vaughan Williams with splintery light captured in some top notes in tthe right hand.

Fear no more the heat o' the sun by Gerald Finzi is more ominous foreboding than rage against the dying of the light or philosophical ascceptance but in another Shakespeare lyric, It was a lover and his lass is a great contrast with its frolicsome 'hey ding-a-ding-a-ding' and 'the only pretty ring time' of Spring.

Herbert Howells's King David was dark and melancholic before James went into overdrive in his animated rendering of If I were a rich man in which he shook off the classical manner for something entirely more theatrical and a tour de force ending.

It's easy to imagine James taking on some of those enormous roles in Wagner, I don't know if he has, and it might have been of interest to hear more gentleness sometimes in the voice and not only in the piano because although it doesn't lack sensitivity, it's a Ted Hughes of a voice. But, back in his old parish, he returned in triumph.