Irish song has a world of life in it, is not puffed-up, knows that a good laugh is part of life just as much as a good cry, enjoys a tale, a tune and a dance. This was evident in the earlier recital by these artists, ‘The Last Rose of Summer’ (Hyperion, 8/93), and perhaps more engagingly so, for that was all-Irish whereas this, as a glance at the contents shows, is rather more cosmopolitan. There is also more of the ‘art-song’ in this (inverted commas because although I always think I can tell when ’tis and ’tisn’t I tend to fight shy of attempting a definition). Herbert Hughes and Beethoven, for instance, preserve the folk-song but bring it into the drawing-room, the borderline of ‘art-song’. Samuel Barber sets Joyce with as deliberate an exercise of the artist’s resources as Hugo Wolf setting Goethe. Berlioz and Bax absorb the folk element and use it to make something which is of their own substance. The interesting Vittorio Rieti, in his Two Songs between Two Waltzes, seems not to be particularly aware of Ireland at all. But of course the listener is aware all the time, for though the music tells of Paris, Venice, Vienna, the words are still Yeats’s and their accent is unmistakable.
The performances are sensitive and spirited, recorded sound is fine, and an excellent essay on the repertoire is contributed by David Cairns. As on previous occasions, I find enjoyment of Ann Murray’s singing tends to vary in inverse proportion to the height and loudness of her notes: unevenness of production and deterioration of tone quality I find more troublesome in this recital than in the earlier one. Even so, she will sometimes come up with phrases of real beauty, as she does in the song by Bax and in Barber’s Nuvoletta. There is always character in her singing, and of course there are listeners for whom the purely vocal qualities are a secondary matter at best. Another slight misgiving I have relates to the number of songs in which the words are clearly a man’s. And I’d have liked a touch more rubato in The Star of the County Down. Still, it’s a delightful programme, with many ‘discoveries’, not least the haunting melody of Bid Adieu, written for one of his own poems by James Joyce, who, as David Cairns suggests, is quite probably ‘the star of the disc’.'