OV Allan gives tremendous performance at the Proms

OV Allan Clayton (H 91-99) performed with the BBC Philharmonic at this year’s Proms and was singled out for giving ‘a performance for the archives’.

Ivan Hewett, writing in the Telegraph said, “It benefited from that wonderful tenor Allan Clayton, who is fast becoming the “go-to” tenor for Britten. From his very first high note, inexpressibly gentle yet rock-solid, one knew he was going to be wonderful, and across the following six poems of nocturnal magic and menace he summoned a tremendous range of tone”.

Hewett added it, “may have been the finest performance of Britten’s Nocturne I have ever heard. The tenor Allan Clayton was simply heroic in this setting of eight great poems with nocturnal connotations, which taxes the singer to the limit. Every emotion has to be touched, from awe at the spectacle of Tennyson’s deep-sea Kraken to Wordsworth’s mixture of thrill and fear in Revolutionary Paris, to the utmost delicacy of Keats’s poem about the softness of a summer breeze. The final Shakespeare sonnet took on a huge grandeur of a kind one rarely hears. This may been a difficult year for the Proms, but it’s given us at least one classic performance for the archives”.

Very well done Allan!