The very last song in this recital, sung, like the rest, with exceptional sensitivity and intelligence, expresses a London-based Irishman's nostalgia for 'Irish skies'. Each short verse begins by evoking London in a frowning, Brahmsian C minor, clearing each time to a luminously simple C major as grey streets, murky gas-light and smoky air are repeatedly compared to the 'pearl cloud', the 'lamps of Heav'n', 'the sky ... blue as Mary's cloak' of Ireland. It is a beautiful and touching sequence of contrasts and a fitting epilogue to a recital in which Stanford the Brahmsian and Stanford the Irishman do not always come to terms.
What he was capable of is signalled at the very beginning by the familiar, haunting La belle Dame sans merci, but in an absorbing sequence the programme then surveys the problem that Stanford was facing: that his most characteristic melodic vein was hardly compatible with a Brahmsian harmonic language. They are at times audibly warring in the George Eliot settings of The Spanish gipsy: the melody of Blue wings is delightful, Sweet springtime is a charming Schumannesque toccata and a Brahmsian scherzino is a quite appropriate response to Came a pretty, pretty maid, but in The radiant dark Stanford's lyrical gift is submerged beneath strenuous piano gestures in an attempt to match Eliot's over-heated imagery.
There is a similar mixture of hits and misses among the eight Heine songs (the best here are more indebted to Schubert than to Brahms) but a group of delightfully fresh Irish folk-song settings point the way to the best of the Antrim and Leinster songs, in which a simpler harmonic language does not hamper Stanford's melodic 'Irish accent'. The moving grief of Denny's daughter, the nostalgic lyricism of Lookin' back and A soft day are characteristic of this manner at its finest, and they respond beautifully to Varcoe's light touch and his unexaggerated use of dialect. Indeed his intimacy of manner and care over words make even the minor songs here a pleasure to listen to, and Clifford Benson subtly responds to this. The recording is not airless but focuses closely on the voice.'