The Brighton Festival was once a go-to place for classical music. Now it’s not, having succumbed to populism and a policy of handing over artistic control to a differently street-cred person every year – the 2017 incumbent being the rap poet Kate Tempest, whose devotion to the great composers isn’t obvious.
But her season did have a song recital at Brighton’s Theatre Royal by two of the most promising young performers on the British circuit: baritone Benjamin Appl (who won the newcomer category in last year’s Gramophone Awards) and pianist James Baillieu (who wins everything going). Neither of them happens to be British-born: Appl is German and Baillieu South African. But that they both live in Britain gave a certain edge to their programme, which was built around the Germanic notion of Heimat: a small word with a potency beyond its English equivalent, “home”.
