Eric Coates, the ‘King of Light Music’, is of course best known for his orchestral pieces. His more than 130 published songs tend to be overlooked, belonging as they do to an English song tradition that, by and large, is completely ignored by today’s recitalists. So full marks to Kathryn Rudge and Christopher Glynn for this, the most comprehensive collection of Coates songs ever presented on a single disc – 28 titles, including almost all the best-known ones.

Sadly, the results are not a total success. The ear quickly adjusts in the opening brief song (‘Little Boy Blue’, 1'39") to the empty studio acoustic and the balance between voice and piano, not dissimilar to that on a previous Coates song collection – Brian Rayner Cook and Raphael Terroni back in 1986 (ASV, 3/87 – nla): I prefer to hear voice and piano conjoined in the sound picture. Cook, however, does not have Rudge’s noisy intakes of breath. And his diction is better.

It is unfortunate that her second song should be ‘Sleepy lagoon’, the gloopy 1940 vocal version approved by Coates of his famous 1930 orchestral hit. It is manifestly unsuited to Rudge’s operatic delivery – you cannot hit the word ‘lagoon’ as hard as she does and hope to convey the sense of the lyric. Some of the other gentler songs come off well (‘The Scent of Lilac’, ‘Always as I close my eyes’) with elegant phrasing and a pleasing feel for period style. ‘The Green Hills of Somerset’, one of several songs Coates wrote with the prolific Fred E Weatherly, is sweetly yearning, though spoilt by the unnecessarily splashy final ‘t’ of each ‘Somerset’ (Joan Hammond, in her evergreen recording, managed without). Again, ‘Bird Songs at Eventide’ and ‘I hear you singing’, two more once-popular Coates songs, are fine but compromised by Christopher Glynn’s metronomic reaction to his task (listen to Edwin Schneider, accompanying John McCormack in 1927, taking the song to another level).

The rollicking ‘Reuben Ranzo’, another Weatherly lyric, is better suited to a male voice (Rayner Cook is tremendous) and Richard Edgar-Wilson with pianist Eugene Asti on his splendid disc of lesser-known Coates songs (Marco Polo, 4/96) makes you ask why the spine-tingling ‘Rise up and reach the stars’ is not heard in our concert halls more frequently. The Somm disc comes with a good English-only booklet (Jeremy Dibble) and all the lyrics.