David Russell
David Russell’s countertenor cuts cleanly through Mozart’s scatological canons with The Song Company, and he takes the solo line in Martin Wesley-Smith’s Who Killed Cock Robin?, turning the falsely accused caterpillar into a soft-shoe turn of real charm.
On Mozart Unexpurgated he joins the ensemble for the composer’s rude canons and songs, the kind of party music that thrives on nimble high male voice and quick comic attack. The same clarity serves the environmental programme of The Green CD, where Wesley-Smith’s nursery-rhyme inquest moves from parlour ballad and barbershop to fierce dissonance; Russell’s caterpillar number is the sly centrepiece, a goofy waltz and soft-shoe that still lands the chemical punchline. His contribution is pure ensemble singing with a soloist’s spark: light, pointed, and ready for both the joke and the sting.
Compositions by David Russell appear on
In Flight
Classical guitarist Harold Gretton offers a varied programme spanning some three centuries of solo guitar music, from Sylvius Leopold Weiß in the eighteenth century to his own Australian bird-inspired pieces of the twenty-first.