Christine Brewer is a generous, warm-hearted artist, as her recent Leonore in the Opera-in-English Fidelio showed (8/05), but to ask her to sing such a wide and eclectic programme as she tackles here is a tall order. Predictably she is most at home in the bigger, dramatic pieces. Reiza’s large-scale ‘Ocean! thou mighty monster’ is delivered with the right panache tinged with sensitivity, and benefits from being sung in an original English text. Beethoven’s scena Ah! perfido, as one would expect from her Leonore, is another success, sympathetic in tone, the line always exemplary. It is also good to hear her gentler accents in ‘The night is calm’, a fine solo from Sullivan’s The Golden Legend, once recorded by Florence Austral.

In a totally different idiom, she is warm and appealing in ‘You’ll never walk alone’ (Carousel). In Alceste’s and Donna Anna’s dramatic outbursts, and Elisabeth’s Greeting from Tannhäuser, one appreciates the largesse of the singing but becomes aware that in the higher reaches of her register her tone now hardens uncomfortably. The same is true of the ‘Inflammatus’ from Rossini’s Stabat mater, and here we come to the silliness of making her sing this solo in English; even Austral, an early advocate of opera in English, on the reverse of her Sullivan 78rpm disc, sang the piece – superbly – in the original Latin.

Translation is also something of a problem in the two extracts from operetta. These solos cry out for the original German. In any case Brewer’s voice sounds a touch matronly for Countess Mariza and Giuditta, and they are hardly helped by an overblown recording. However, she disarms criticism in her final offering, ‘Mira’ from Bob Merrill’s Carnival: this, as she explains in a note, takes her back to her roots in small-town Illinois. She sings it with a captivating charm. It also proves conclusively that all the items here that come with English texts in the first place sound so much more natural than those sung in awkward translations. Would that everything had been sung in the original. I simply cannot fathom Chandos’s running order, jerking one back and forth between vastly differing idioms, instead of giving us a chronological order.