Review: Purcell & Blow; Sir Jack Lyons Concert Hall, University of York

10:28am Friday 18th January 2008

This month York, next month New York. Despite the demands of a burgeoning career, Iestyn Davies stepped into the breach on Wednesday and carried all before him. This is a voice that is going to make waves for a long time to come.

The odds were not stacked in his favour. A whole programme of funeral odes and elegies is not everybody's cup of cheer on a dank January night.

Even in the expert hands of Purcell and Blow, they can easily seem formulaic. But the announced singer fell ill and duty called.

Unlike most of the current crop of young countertenors, Davies sounds like a tenor in his lower range, yet makes a seamless transition to falsetto when need be. So the voice retains its masculinity and power.

But these would mean little without his musicality and, more tellingly, his composure.

He remained unfazed through acres of demanding ornamentation, all of which he slotted in without compromising his rhythmic momentum.

To his extended aria within Blow's ode on Purcell's death he brought an icy cool that was breathtaking.

Alternating with Davies, Jason Darnell did well to shackle his potentially large tenor to this intimate music, finding his smoothest line in Purcell's Epicedium for Queen Mary.

But one suspects he would be more comfortable in later repertoire.

A Blow sonata conjured pleasing virtuosity from the recorders of Pamela Thorby and Ailsa Reid, and David Miller's theorbo gleamed among some dab- handed continuo.