English song from Dowland to Purcell is a field worthy of any singer’s cultivation, yet remarkably few except our own native-bred early music specialists care to interest themselves. Welcome then to one who does. Barbara Bonney has the freshness of style and purity of voice to make an apt contribution, one that can with fair confidence be expected to bring no overload of personality and yet have something personal to add, and to have also at command reserves of feeling that will not spill over or cloy. Sometimes when an American sings English songs there will be anomalies of pronunciation, especially in vowel-sounds, that stick in English ears, but only a little of that occurs here. Perhaps, more anxiously, one awaits the discovery that, in this two-way traffic, our own bad habits may have been received as signs of authenticity and therefore to be copied. Occasionally there does seem to be something of this: when, for example, in the first song (‘Come again’) the notes on triumph (‘she for triumph laughs’) are lightly aspirated; or, in the second (‘If my complaint’), individual notes within a phrase are treated to a small but intrusive crescendo. For the most part the authenticity is ensured by habitually good production and responsiveness to text and notes.
The programme is well chosen and sensibly ordered. The lute-songs come first, their mood ranging from the epigrammatic humour of ‘Away with these self-loving lads’ to the haunting melancholy of Campion among the cypresses. Viols take over as the accompaniment with Byrd’s fine setting of Sir Philip Sidney’s O Lord, how vain are all our delights, Though Amaryllis dance in green, the intricate syncopations of which regularly floor all but the most assured of madrigal groups. Byrd’s Fantasy and the two airs from Purcell’s incidental music to Mrs Behn’s Abdelazer are instrumental pieces and provide a break from the singer at about the halfway-mark. She is then reintroduced with the sublime Plaint from The Fairy Queen (good to hear it not taken too slowly), and Dido’s lament comes as the unfollowable conclusion.
In between we have a song which gives the recital its name. This ‘fairest isle’ – and let’s hope it is still at least partly recognisable as such – is the country in which the singer has now made her home. The title and choice of repertoire are perhaps chosen as a modest tribute. She is an artist whose work we have long prized, and whom, with her fellow musicians, we will no doubt take further to hear in this most enjoyable programme.'