It’s too bad: here I am, glad to see once more available a valued recital disc, and yet almost first thing after Philip Langridge has started singing (and enunciating quite clearly) I have to suppress an irritated realisation that no printed texts are included. These are all settings of verses by WH Auden, whose words insistently proclaim importance; they challenge the intelligence; they can hardly be assimilated in time with the music; and there is much about them which cannot intelligently be assimilated anyway. Britten, for whatever reasons, stopped using his poetry as a familiar quarry for solo song-setting once the period of potent youthful influence was over (most of the songs here are from 1936-38). Lennox Berkeley’s Five Poems Op 53 are dated 1958, and largely deal with Auden by subsuming him – the writing for piano, intricate and often delightful, diverts the ear and virtually establishes a life of its own.

In all of this, Steuart Bedford misses nothing of his opportunities, which include the lazy-cowboy rhythm of ‘Tell me the truth about love’ and the finger-skinning glissandi of ‘Funeral Blues’. Those (the Cabaret Songs) are sung, more to my satisfaction than to Alan Blyth’s when he reviewed the original issue, by Della Jones. Most of the recital goes to Philip Langridge, impressive in his deployment of those slightly weird colorations that seem ‘written-in’ (though never quite explicitly) in Britten’s scores. He sings Night covers up the rigid land in settings by both composers, and includes the later, solo setting of Underneath the abject willow, ending with the duet-version, originally coupled with ‘Mother Comfort’ in Two Ballads (1937).