BBT Track Record

A Gardener’s World
Flower songs by Chausson, Elgar, Gustavino, Muriel Herbert, Mendelssohn, Poulenc, Schubert, Clara & Robert Schumann, Toldrà, Haydn Wood and
Flanders & Swann
Alessandro Fisher tenor
Anna Tilbrook piano

Rubicon Classics RCD 1087

A marvellous recital, both in terms of programming and of execution. Congratulations to recording engineer Oscar Torres and Producer Peter Thresh for capturing the Wigmore acoustic so successfully. This disc is a real triumph for all concerned, full of freshness, full of discovery.

Colin Clarke, Classical Explorer, March 2024

Alessandro Fisher’s debut recording is not so much a garden posy as a whole estate, within which he and his pianist Anna Tilbrook plant a programme that elegantly blends the familiar with the lesser know…. Fisher is in fine voice … a commandingly English tenor with a burnished upper register … ‘Flowers reveal the feeling of the heart’. And, in Fisher and Tilbrook’s horticultural recording, much else besides.

Christopher Cook, BBC Music Magazine, April 2024

The lightness and flexibility of Alessandro Fisher’s tenor is a joy in all of these things… It’s a tenderly expressive recital and a sensitive publisher. A Gardener’s World turns out to be a beautiful place to lose yourself for a while.

Andrew MacGregor, BBC Radio 3 Record Review, 24 February 2024

I’m inclined to rate Sibelius’s six Op 88 song as this recital’s pièce de résistance. Whether it be in the spine-tingling moment when the vocal line rises to a top B flat in that noble ode to the neglected thorn (The Thorn), the heartbreak conveyed in The Flower’s Fate, the trilling of the lark in Blue Anemone or the tranquil The Two Roses, the words battered and broken, delivered half-spoken, this is an interpretation of rare insight …

I’d suggest that not since Martin Isepp accompanied Janet Baker on that bargain Saga long-player from many moons ago has a British singer made a more auspicious recital debut on record.

Adrian Edwards. Gramophone, March 2024