According to programme notes, Wilhelm Stenhammar (1871-1927) was “the most outstanding musical personality of his time in Sweden". — a fact that speaks volumes either of the insularity of British musical awareness or (if one were feeling less charitable) of the paucity of Swedish musical genius. In any case, I suspect that I was not alone in encountering this composer for the first time at the Oxford Lieder Festival recital at the Holywell Music Room by baritone Giles Underwood and pianist Martin Sturfalt.

Setting Swedish folk and art song against their English and Irish equivalents, the programme was built around two contrasting focal points: Stenhammer’s romantic folk-inspired cycle Seven Poems from Thoughts of Loneliness and Vaughan Williams’s Songs of Travel, with Stenhammer’s Three Fantasies for Solo Piano serving as a textural palate cleanser.

Searching for stylistic fingerprints in Stenhammer’s works it soon becomes evident that his defining characteristic is, in fact, his very diversity. Seven Poems is something of a stylistic showcase, comprising a series of musical miniatures that range from the sub-Schumann folk ballad In solitude my years pass, to the darkly dramatic You had me in love. The whole feels somewhat unbalanced in performance — a collection of attractive fragments, rather than a coherent musical whole. While evidently suffering in his upper register, Underwood produced a warmly convincing performance, appearing to relish particularly the expressive opportunities for drama, deftly supported by Sturfalt’s elegant — if occasionally rather bloodless — accompaniment.

d=3,3,1Underwood really came into his own in the Vaughan Williams, however, commanding its distinctively English musical dialect with flexible assurance. In his hands the wandering narrator — so often a beautifully sung cipher — became a fleshed out portrait of a man scarred by life’s hardships, at times passionately bitter and at others still determinedly and poignantly lyric, but always coherent. Exploiting his rich lower register and sinuously connected singing, The vagabond and Bright is the ring of words were the highlights of an evening of sensitive and intelligent music-making.