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Sunday Times review

17th July 2010

Paula Driver in the Sunday Times, reviews Fretwork’s concert with Iestyn Davies at the Cheltenham Festival.

The Saturday-morning programme, given in the Pittville Pump Room by the viol consort Fretwork and the superbly pure-voiced countertenor Iestyn Davies, encompassed not only three searingly chromatic Gesualdo songs, and two by Wolf, but melancholy effusions by Dowland, Warlock and Britten, the accompaniment for viols proving in the modern cases oddly effective. Britten’s grief-stricken, overwhelming folk-song treatment, O waly, waly, elicited Davies’s finest mastery, and was, for me, a textbook instance of those shivers down the spine.