Like Peter Pears before him, Mark Padmore has excelled in a wide range of repertoire, including Purcell songs and the Evangelist in Bach’s Passions. The appreciation he shows in those works for how to make words expressive in a musical line stands him in good stead as a Britten tenor.

The two song-cycles that he pairs on this disc are highly contrasted. The Holy Sonnets of John Donne were composed in 1945, soon after Britten’s visit to German concentration camps, and the stark immediacy of that experience can be heard in the composer’s own recordings. Padmore and Roger Vignoles, his warm-toned accompanist, take a more reflective line. Tempi are slower, the emotions feel more consoling, and at the core of the cycle is some heartfelt singing in the sixth and most beautiful setting, “Since she whom I loved”.

The vivid picture-painting of Winter Words helps make it probably Britten’s most popular song-cycle with piano. Several of the Thomas Hardy poems evoke a time of innocence now lost, a familiar Britten theme, and the evocative performance by Padmore and Vignoles captures that sense of longing particularly well. The portrait of the lone boy traveller on the Great Western could be more vivid (Vignoles’s train jogs along somewhat sluggishly), but otherwise Padmore dramatises the narrative songs with subtlety and imagination.

By chance, the same two cycles are paired by Philip Langridge (Naxos, 7/04). A choice between the discs is not easy, but as the singers are so good and so different – Langridge the more verbally acute, Padmore the more vocally eloquent – the obvious answer is to get both. Padmore also includes three of Britten’s Purcell realisations and a handful of the lesser-known folksongs, all impeccably sung. As a bonus, Harmonia Mundi’s presentation is excellent.