Neglect is no respecter of style or quality: conservative or radical, good or bad, composers may find themselves disregarded for a multitude of reasons—and sometimes for no reason at all. Different as they are, Elizabeth Lutyens and Gordon Crosse are two composers I would like to see much more extensively available on record than they are at the moment, and the works of theirs on this excellent collection of vocal compositions from Meriel Dickinson and her brother Peter show why.
Crosse's The New World, to poems by Ted Hughes, is a big, confident piece that represents the virtues and potential of the kind of post-Britten idiom that ought to be more in evidence today than it is. The nervily detailed piano accompaniments to the shapely melodic lines may be too consistently busy in the earlier stages, but the whole attains a moving simplicity and distinctiveness. Lutyens's Stevie Smith Songs are no less simple and distinctive. Although their gentle diatonic style is worlds away from Lutyens's normal modernism, it reveals a comparable refinement and as sure an instinct for the effective fusion of economy and expressiveness.
The works by Harvey, Panufnik and Dickinson himself all contribute significantly to the value of this reissue, with only the final section of Panufnik's Dreamscape, after the main climax, seeming too long. The original analogue recording of the Crosse, made in 1974, now appears to have a more natural and effective balance than the 1978 vintage of the remainder, where—in the Harvey, at least—the piano is rather obviously distanced from the voice. But all these performances still come across with exemplary vitality and finesse.'