Few opera singers can make their eyes look quite as dementedly wild as tenor Allan Clayton. When Clayton’s eyes widen, their whites pop ever so slightly out of their sockets; they pierce with a lunatic urgency that sends shivers down a listener’s spine.
Alongside his commanding voice and presence, those wild eyes have fueled the tenor’s recent breakout performances at the Metropolitan Opera — first in the crazed title role of Brett Dean’s Hamlet during the opera’s May 2022 U.S. premiere run and then, five months later, as an arresting Peter Grimes, leading The New York Times to trumpet the tenor’s place among the Met’s stars. And indeed, that intense insanity returned on several occasions during Clayton’s North American debut recital on April 27 at the Park Avenue Armory, given in tandem with pianist and close friend James Baillieu. The tenor’s eyes throbbed with passion in Robert Schumann’s Kerner-Lieder, alternated between suspense and rapture for a selection of 20th-century British music, and even twinkled with notes of cheeky slapstick during an endearing set of folk-song arrangements.
Clayton’s voice was glorious as it ricocheted off the wood paneling of the Armory’s Board of Officers Room. On the spectrum of lieder singers, Clayton falls toward the delicious operatic extreme. He soared brilliantly in his upper register, his radiant wail never sacrificing richness or clarity. His whisper, a grippingly intimate falsetto mix, was equally dramatic both despite and because of its economy. Through the rapid gauntlets of a Benjamin Britten Canticle, Clayton demonstrated agility and diaphragmatic precision, strengthened by an obviously keen ear. But that same diaphragm turned to steel for Schumann’s famously punishing “Stille Tränen,” the tenor’s breath support verging on superhuman as Baillieu spared no rubato in pulsing sextuplets below.
Above all, Clayton’s voice is one of great character. It chortled with ominous humor for the animal sound effects of Michael Tippett’s tempestuous Songs for Ariel. It limped with woe as Schumann’s protagonist fell ever deeper into despair. It screamed with deranged devotion in British-South African composer Rainier Priaulx’s Cycle for Declamation. (That 1954 triptych of unaccompanied Donne settings was commissioned by tenor Peter Pears for the Aldeburgh Music Festival. Clayton and Baillieu attribute much of their friendship to midwinter coachings in that Suffolk coast town.) Occasionally, Clayton would pare his voice to an almost Sondheim-ish singsong, channeling a campfire storyteller more than an opera singer. But the next moment, his voice would return in its full, powerful splendor, cresting over triumphant arpeggios with surges of bold energy.
Clayton loosened his proverbial tie for the four Britten folk-song arrangements that ended his program, more of the large repertoire that the tenor shares with the late Pears. After an evening of heartstring tugs and holy exaltation, it was the first time Clayton let his charming comedy shine. He poked subtle fun at the repetitive strophes of “Sally in our Alley” without toeing the fourth wall — the song’s titular rhyme appears eight times over four minutes. After two more earnest selections, Clayton stepped into his final character: a wandering folksman who was remarkably happy to have spent 20 years inside a crocodile’s stomach. Between exaggerated pouts, martial belly drums on his high-waisted slacks, and a bit of hammed-up British nonsense — “To my rit fal lal li bollem tit!” — the tenor had the audience in hysterics.
Though he provided staunch undergirding in the program’s homophonic accompaniments, Baillieu proved himself a melodist first and foremost. Whether slinking through Schumann’s faux-chorale countermelodies, invoking Tippett’s birds, or wading through Britten’s harmonic mire, Baillieu’s touch was always light, his phrasing astute. In the evening’s final encore, another Britten folk song, he even had his turn at “singing” — it was really closer to bellowing — as a frustrated suitor whose sultry wooing falls on literal deaf ears. As Clayton’s Mrs.-Doubtfire falsetto goaded the suitor ever louder, the pair finally forefronted the camaraderie that made their recital such a joy.
