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| Lawrence Brownlee |
Tenor Lawrence Brownlee is on of the premier bel canto tenors around at the moment. And he’s rightly busy, his season included a last-minute step-in as Elvino in Bellini’s La sonnambula at the Met, where he recently opened in Donizetti’s La fille du régiment, alongside Erin Morley, and further ahead there he stars in a new production of Bellini’s I Puritani – the Met’s first in nearly fifty years.
The good news is that Brownlee is making a London appearance on 22 November 2025 in recital at Wigmore Hall with pianist Iain Burnside. Their programme is a fascinating showcase of music by Italian and American composers with nary an operatic aria in sight.
Instead, Brownless and Burnside open with a selection of songs by Donizetti before moving onto Respighi. Then they move on to Liszt’s Tre sonetti di Petrarca in the virtuosic first version. Arias in all but name, this is music inspired by Liszt’s sojurn in Italy in the 1830s and we can almost hear distant hints of Bellini in the vocal line, which makes it all the more desirable having them sung by a bel canto tenor.
The second half of the programme reflects Brownlee’s engagement with more recent music. First there is Dominick Argento’s Six Elizabethan Song and songs from Ricky Ian Gordon’s Genuis Child.
Argento’s songs were written in the late 1950s for the tenor Nicholas Di Virgilio. The composer said of them, “The songs are called ‘Elizabethan’ because the lyrics are drawn from that rich period in literature, while the music is in the spirit (if not the manner) of the great English composer- singer-lutenist, John Dowland. The main concern is the paramount importance of the poetry and the primacy of the vocal line over a relatively simple and supportive accompaniment.“
Ricky Ian Gordon’s Genuis Child is a cycle of ten songs written in 1993 for soprano Harolyn Blackwell. They set poems by Langston Hughes and the songs were described as “one of the freshest English language song cycles to come along in recent memory”.
Brownlee’s project Rising, commissioned six of today’s leading African-American composers to set poetry from the Harlem Renaissance to song. Brownlee recorded their cycles alongside selections by Margaret Bonds and Robert Owens.
And at the concert Brownlee will be singing Robert Owens’ Desire, settings of four poems by Langston Hughes. Robert Owens (1925-2017) was born in Texas and studied in Europe after the War, returning to Germany in the late 1950s where he developed a career as a film and stage actor, composer, and pianist.
Brownlee will also be performing songs by Jasmine Barnes and Joel Thompson from his Rising project.
Full details from the Wigmore Hall website.
