Driving northwards through France a couple of Sundays ago I happened across a panel review on France Musique of six different performances of the Britten Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings. The review was extremely detailed, and paid particular attention to the English diction of the various singers and their regard for the poetry of the songs. The final choice (ahead of performances by Mark Padmore and Ian Bostridge) was the recording by Anthony Rolfe Johnson with Michael Thompson (horn) and the RSNO conducted by Bryden Thomson. It was difficult to disagree with this conclusion. Once back at home, a Google search led me to this recording, and I downloaded the lot. The Serenade fully lived up to expectations. Rolfe Johnson's singing is matchless, and the horn obbligato is wonderful: try the fifth song in the cycle ('Dirge'). But that's not all. Felicity Lott's performance of Les Illuminations is thrilling, and the Quatre Chansons Françaises (which I had not previously heard) are beautiful. Just few quibbles about the download: (1) I tried downloading the entire recording in a single operation, but the Chandos downloader failed with a Java error in both Internet Explorer and Firefox, even though I am running the latest Java version, and (2) I though that the ID tags in the FLAC files were rather arbitrary and unhelpful; it was rather tedious to edit the tags to my liking!