The impressive centrepiece was Britten's Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings, with a fine pair of soloists in tenor John Mark Ainsley and the SCO's own principal horn Alec Frank-Gemmill, a player of rare composure and subtlety. Together they brought agile muscularity to the songs: the transition from Frank-Gemmill's bold and spacious Prologue to Ainsley's breezy Pastoral was a thrill, the Elegy was nicely laced with irony, and the spectral Dirge was hushed and macabre in Ainsley's plangent high register. Kate Molleson, The Guardian, 29th April 2013

Having been left on a high by Suckling’s questing final peroration, we were kept there by a performance of Britten’s Serenade for tenor, horn and strings that had something quite magical about it...the artlessly nuanced singing of John Mark Ainsley, sounding as fresh as he has done for years. Andrew Clark, Financial Times, 29th April 2013

...it was to the enormous credit of the trio of musicians - the SCO's principal horn, Alec Frank-Gemmill, pianist Tom Poster and respected tenor John Mark Ainsley - that their performances were so magnificently life-affirming, glowing with vivid colours and alive with crackling energy... Poster was the only performer onstage throughout, and his two solo Schubert impromptus sang with a ringing clarity. Ainsley refused to bow to Auf dem Strom's death-obsessed mood, giving instead a reading that was airy and somewhat wide-eyed - and all the more poignant for that. But it was his scorching, unforgiving performance of Britten's Still Falls the Rain, breathtakingly intense, that made the concert's high point - although he dismissed the audience on a lighter note with a sparkling quintet of Britten's witty folksong settings. David Kettle, The Scotsman, 23rd April 2013

And Ainsley’s airy and supple tenor was movingly caught in Vaughan Williams’s Orpheus with his Lute...

Neil Fisher, The Times, 30th November 2012

...no other tenor of today is better able to locate the plangent centre of Britten’s vocal lines. Although grounded in the English tradition, there is a keening Italianate edge to Ainsley’s tone that rent the heart during ‘Move him into the sun’ and ‘One ever hangs where shelled roads part’.

Mark Valencia, Classical Source, November 2012

The “featuring” roles — John Mark Ainsley’s Skuratov... — could hardly be better done today.

Hugh Canning, The Sunday Times, 9th October 2011

John Mark Ainsley's plangent, dark-toned tenor and intense diction show us a more neurotic Vere than usual, ridden with doubts and anxieties behind the urbane front he presents to his officers, in his old age reliving the traumatic execution.

Michael Scott Rohan, BBC Music Magazine, July 2011

John Mark Ainsley, Rebecca Evans and Sarah Connolly twittered and cooed tonight with impressively straight faces. But the highlight was Connolly's plangent rendering of WH Auden's Out On the Lawn I Lie in Bed, a stark indication that Britten's hymn to spring is equally a thanksgiving for Europe's deliverance from war. Mark Elder conducted with absolute conviction; the Hallé Children's Choir sang (and, when called for, whistled) with gusto; even the man on the cow horn lowed magnificently.

Alfred Hickling, The Guardian, 15 May 2011