This recital had no name; but it is pungent with Intimations of Mortality. Allen's noble baritone now incarnates this awareness superbly, whether in the numb grief of Hugo Wolf's 'Harper' songs from Goethe's Wilhelm Meister, in his lightly-breathed 'Anakreons Grab' or in the pathos-tinted Beethoven songs at the start.

Allen at 60 sings with a beauty of tone and production which would be remarkable in a man half his age. …it seems to me that the warmth of feeling and the play of imagination have been enriched in him during the past five or six years, so that I'd be unlikely to find any comparable singer achieving a more satisfying balance between the vocal and expressive aspects of his art.

As always, Allen was a supremely intelligent recitalist, matching sound with sense, probing the meaning of a text without fracturing the focal line