Spain, Suffolk and New England proved a flavoursome mix in the finale of Nancy Cooley’s enterprising Lewes Festival of Song. In the atmospheric setting of the twelfth-century church of St Anne’s, soprano Mary Plazas and Cooley paired songs by Britten and Copland with the earthy Spanish folk tradition as recreated by Manuel de Falla and Fernando Obradors.

Plazas’s intense involvement, her gift for ‘selling’ a song, will come as no surprise to anyone who has seen her at ENO, whether as Puccini’s doomed Mimi and Cio-Cio San or as a captivating Sharpears in The Cunning Little Vixen. Abetted by Cooley’s rhythmically pungent playing, she caught all the bravado, acerbity and (in the haunting ‘Nocturne’) dreamlike mystery of Britten’s early Auden cycle On this Island. Finding darker, rawer colours within her bright lyric soprano, Plazas was a deft and witty story teller in the Obradors folksong arrangements (her Iberian heritage and fluent Spanish an obvious advantage here). In Copland’s settings of Emily Dickinson, suffused with images of transience and death, she was tender and touching, making every word tell within a truly ‘bound’ legato line. 

Plazas and Cooley, as ever in close collusion, then had a field day in the piquant cameos of Falla’s Canciones Populares Españolas. Mingling charm, grace and fiery southern temperament, Plazas relished alike the unbridled wildness of ‘Jota’ and the poignancy and delicacy of the reflective songs. The almost delirious vehemence of the final ‘Polo’ rightly brought the house down, setting the seal on a memorable recital that moved and delighted in equal measure.