Far from the hustle and bustle of the big opera business, Mark Padmore has built a career around carefully selected and crafted performances, which over the last four decades have evolved into veritable events. That certainly applies to this song recital, probably his last at La Monnaie. Accompanied by pianist Simon Lepper, the English tenor is presenting an inspired programme of Anglo-Saxon songs to texts by Shakespeare, Thomas Hardy and others, sensitively set to music by composers like Benjamin Britten, Samuel Barber, Gustav Holst and Charles Ives. On the other side of the Channel they are met by the mélodies of Gabriel Fauré and Reynaldo Hahn, each in musical settings of poems by Paul Verlaine. C’est l’heure exquise!