Sarah Walker and Roger Vignoles take quite a risk in building an entire recital exclusively of encore pieces. I don't imagine, mark you, that they expect it to be listened through from beginning to end every time you take it off the shelf, but I have to report that I have done so, more than once, without feeling any impatient need to skip a few bands. Walker's versatility is an important part of the reason for this. She can descend into a brassy lower register to belt out such a number as They all laughed, and the next moment or the next but one can revert to a finer line and a subtler manner, singing Liza Lehmann's There are fairies at the bottom of our garden perfectly straight. The packed and appreciative Wigmore Hall audience (the recording conveys that hall's atmosphere quite splendidly) are obviously keyed-up to laugh like anything at this piece of Victorian kitsch, but Walker won't let them; they are hushed into a quieter, more appreciative amusement at its naive prettiness.
That authority (it extends in the most roof-raisingly comic number here, Flanders and Swann's A word on my ear, to persuading the audience to suppress its laughter for fear they will miss the next line) goes with a voice whose smoky graininess fits the Broadway show-song repertory so well that she has no need to assume an American accent to ensure authenticity. Nor is there any impression, as there often is with cross-over albums of the material being glamorized and blown up beyond its scale by a voice of operatic amplitude. The voice is quite big, of course, but Walker knows how to save its full resources for moments that need them (the ill-fated Mrs Hoggenheimer involuntarily returning Cole Porter's indigestible oyster to the deep, gets a sonorous blast of what you might call her Schumann-Heink manner).
And anyhow, not all these pieces are light-weight trifles. No coy quotation marks are put around the simple, touching sentiment of Kern's and Wodehouse's Bill, the ruefulness of Gershwin's Boy, what has love done to me or the evocative urban poetry of Geoffrey Wight's Transatlantic lullaby. The Schoenberg cabaret songs are done in English, which allows Walker and Vignoles to capitalize on the kinships they thus acquire with Victorian song (Gigerlette might almost be by Parry). Even Gershwin's engaging title-song has enough incident and fantasy in its keyboard part to earn a place in the main body of a song-recital, not among the encores. Of the real encore-pieces, Jeremy Nicholas's two clever patter-songs and William Bolcom's incitement to share Mrs Hoggenheimer's nausea will stand only a few hearings, perhaps, save at parties, but A word on my ear, the confession of a tone-deaf prima donna, is a little classic and brings the house down.'