Anyone who shares the attitude to the part-song repertory of Jim Dixon in Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim (he fled from the ''infantile fa-la-las'', you may remember, pursued by cries of ''Aren't you going to stay for the P. Racine Fricker?'') will find this anthology instructive. They may grow a little restive during the first half of Side 2, where no less than seven folk-songs, one after the other, ar submitted to genteel improvement (though to be sure the Holst arrangement is as clean and sweet as can be, and the Stanford is brief and witty, and I am eternally indebted to Messrs. Grainger and Rutter for not ruining the Londonderry Air with sentimental words or sloppy rubato) but their attention should be happily seized by the remainder. Stanford's The blue bird is given the performance of its life, with immaculately controlled dynamics beautiflly sustained throughout. Delius's two wordless aquarelles are all the more delicate for being so precisely and securely sung, and the finely-scored contrasts between a double choir of male and female voices (antiphonal yet interlocking) in Elgar's There is sweet magic are exquisitely rendered, uniting together in a magically quiet final chord. There are some tricky problems of chording in the first two of the Vaughan Williams pieces, but they are expertly negotiated, the fourth chord of The Cloud-capp'd Towers, at which the music seems to grow before your eyes and ears, is a splendid moment and splendidly caught. There is plenty of purity and freshness of tone, too, for the Britten pieces.
The Cambridge Singers, remembered for their Gramophone Award-winning recording of Rutter's edition of the Faure Requiem on Conifer, are a very disciplined and homogenous small choir, excellently balanced and very skilled in producing fine shadings of colour within a controlled dynamic range. Their sopranos, while not pretending to be trebles, are very pure and rather white; if I must find an adverse criticism it would be that their tone tends to 'stare' a little in high-lying passages. And their coolness can reduce the scale of waht they are singing a trifle: in Vaughan Williams's Full Fathom Five the bells (which seem to be saying 'ting tong' rather than 'ding dong') are alluringly silvery, not brazen. But the collection as a whole gives much pleasure; I hope it will be followed by other explorations of an often underrated repertoire.'