There are a few things without which the Wigmore Hall's Director's Festival would simply not be complete, and one is a recital by Thomas Allen. Preferably, on paper at least, something like this one, with half the programme taken from the lieder repertoire and half devoted to something lighter, sung in English, with which Sir Thomas can charm the socks off all present.
But there was something missing from this programme, which balanced Beethoven with British and Irish folk and parlour songs. While there were plenty of songs to bring a lump to one's throat, none required the kind of witty, tongue-in-cheek delivery at which Allen can excel.
In fact, it was a sense of innocence that prevailed (something not often said about an Allen concert). Herbert Hughes's wistful setting of The Salley Gardens had a piano part more intricately woven than Britten's famous version, but lacked that setting's tinge of darkness, while several songs by Haydn Wood gloried in the kind of big, sentimental endings designed to extract applause and tears in equal measure.
Allen drew on a lighter voice for the last two verses of She Moved Through the Fair, to good effect, though a slip with the words denied the song its ghostly sting. Still, the languid, gently shaped phrases of old favourites such as The Lark in the Clear Air and Roses of Picardy were a good vehicle for the honeyed smoothness of Allen's baritone and for Malcolm Martineau's idiomatic accompaniment.
It might not all have seemed so indulgent had the Beethoven of the first half not been so characterised by classical good taste. After beginning with four brief, delicate numbers, three of them in Italian, Allen warmed into the initially hymn-like Busslied, in which Martineau's increasingly decorative piano part threatened to gain prominence but never quite tipped the balance.
On a purely musical level, the brief song cycle An die ferne Geliebte was the programme's high point: even if more might have been made of its nuances of colour, it was flowingly sung, and with the thunderous crescendo in the final bars we were given the Allen magic we had been waiting for.
