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The Birmingham Post isn’t always able to post online everything that I’ve written for its print edition, so – after a suitable time lag (you should really go out and buy the paper!) – I’ll be posting my recent reviews here. As per the print edition, they’re all fairly concise – just 250 words. This is of a performance at Birmingham Conservatoire on Tuesday 18 October.

Sweet are the uses of adversity. It’s not that there was anything wrong with Christoph Prégardien and Christoph Schnackertz’s recital at the Conservatoire before, five songs into Britten’s Winter Words, all the lights failed.

It’s just that (after some smart work from the Conservatoire’s concert management), Prégardien and Schnackertz handled the situation with such grace and good humour that everything suddenly felt a little different – as if a bond had been established between audience and performers. The pair gamely performed the rest of their programme by daylight alone, at the mercy of passing clouds and to the accompaniment of metallic creaks from the slowly cooling spotlights. At the end, the audience erupted in cheers.

As well they might. Prégardien’s tenor is a lovely thing; flexible, fluid, with no break in tone quality between registers – it’s elegantly focussed in all areas. At the top, it’s ringing without being strident. At the bottom, where it shades towards a baritone, it’s marvellously oaky. I was reminded of a clarinet, but that’s to overlook Prégardien’s alertness to the text. He characterises lightly, with tone-colours – a quiet, confiding glow at the end of Schubert’s Um Mitternacht, a mix of fragility and robustness in Britten’s At The Railway Station, Upway.

But that’s all rolled into a long, sweet, singing line, deftly moulded to Schnackertz’s crisp, vivid accompaniments, complete with splashes of impressionist colour in Britten’s Midnight on the Great Western and a heroic swagger in Schubert’s Lebensmut. Each song came across as a single, natural whole, and under any circumstances this would have been a deeply rewarding recital. Shame and shame again, though, on whoever let their mobile phone ring mid-concert. No excuse: end of.

The Birmingham Post isn’t always able to post online everything that I’ve written for its print edition, so – after a suitable time lag (you should really go out and buy the paper!) – I’ll be posting my recent reviews here. As per the print edition, they’re all fairly concise – just 250 words. This is of a performance at Birmingham Conservatoire on 1 December 2015.

The ideal duo partnership is more than the sum of its parts. The two musical personalities don’t merge, exactly, but balance, complement and inspire each other to create a performance that enshrines the qualities of both artists – and still sounds like it sings with one voice.

That’s exactly what we got from Tasmin Little and Piers Lane in César Franck’s Violin Sonata, the climax of this lunchtime recital at Birmingham Conservatoire. It’s too simple to say that Lane’s piano represented the dark and Little’s violin the light side of Franck’s masterpiece. Both shared the same ability to charge a repeated sequence of notes with mounting emotional intensity; both understood instinctively when to make a phrase growl or gleam.

But even at its most tranquil, an undercurrent of passion drove the whole performance. Franck’s runaway accelerandos and torrential outbursts of emotion have rarely sounded more natural, or more necessary. Earlier, the pair had dispatched Brahms’s FAE Scherzo in a single symphonic sweep, and made a poetic case for Szymanowski’s neglected D minor sonata, Lane colouring his staccato chords to emulate the texture of Little’s pizzicato, and Little spinning delicate golden tracery in the skies above.

And as an encore, they pulled out an exquisite, recently rediscovered miniature by William Lloyd Webber – father of the Conservatoire’s new principal. It was enough to make you forget that you were in the grotty old Adrian Boult Hall. With artists of this quality and a sizeable and enthusiastic audience, there was no better demonstration of the promising new spirit that seems to be blowing through the Conservatoire.