Customer Reviews

Beautiful songs, not sure about the performance - By: , 21 Mar 2000
John Ireland's songs are amongst the most finely-crafted anywhere. His sympathy with the poems he chooses is quite uncanny. He was always full of original harmonic ideas, reserving for his songs his richest creative energy. They are deceptively simple, & actually have to be sung carefully & with great intelligence. John Shirley-Quirk & Janet Baker had the technique & the passion to do it well. Here, there is rather too much warble, & general romantic frillery for my taste. A plainer & more expressive delivery would surely have worked wonders. This CD is most welcome because it performs seldom-heard parts of John Irelands work. The piano-work is uniformly excellent & the CDs publication is very welcome