Much of Balfour Gardiner’s music has remained under a bushel for years. Celebrated in church for his bracing anthem, Evening Hymn, and at one time in the concert hall for his orchestral favourite, the somewhat Graingeresque Shepherd Fennel’s Dance, he has suffered much neglect on CD, save for some piano works (with Peter Jacobs on the Continuum label) and the recently recorded and highly attractive Overture to a Comedy (Chandos). This recording of the complete songs (along with three piano miniatures) is therefore a most welcome addition to the discography in that it provides a picture of the highly self-critical Gardiner from his student days in the 1890s at Charterhouse and Frankfurt until the early 1920s, when he resolved to renounce composition altogether.

The songs are, for the most part, a mixed bag. The early unpublished pieces have a euphonious charm, while the songs from the turn of the century echo the suave craftsmanship of Quilter, especially those using familiar Shakespeare texts (‘Fear no more the heat o’ the sun’ and ‘Full fathom five’). There are settings of Housman (‘When I was one-and-twenty’ and ‘The Recruit’), Masefield (‘Roadways’) and Goethe (‘The Wanderer’s Evensong’) which date from the 1900s; but the most personal songs tend to be those of a more introspective nature, such as ‘Winter’, ‘Chelsea Embankment’ and ‘The Quiet Garden’. Oxenham’s interpretations are sympathetic and his diction clear, though just occasionally there is some unsteady intonation. Beatty’s accompaniments are sensitive, as is his role as soloist in De profundis and the piano version of Shepherd Fennel’s Dance.