Probably never did a composer feel more closely drawn to his poet than Finzi to Hardy; yet (one has to put this personally) I’ve never felt that he really ‘got’ him. The grim humour, the defiantly resourceful rhyming, the near-colloquial confiding (as to a note-book): Finzi’s music catches much, but not quite these things which are very personal to Hardy and which you can’t have him without. But, more difficult to resolve, there’s an anomaly in performance: the mannerly, cultivated English voice and the drawing-room associations of the grand piano are themselves not-Hardy. It’s hard to say and harder to do, but somehow the performers of these songs have to make us forget them as singer and pianist, and become as nearly as possible the voice of the poems.

Comparing versions, I found Stephen Varcoe and Clifford Benson managed to achieve this more nearly than Roderick Williams and Iain Burnside do. For the singer it’s partly a matter of approximating tone as far as possible to speech-rhythms and shadings; for the pianist, partly a matter of following with the imagination Hardy’s words and unexpressed meaning when the voice itself has stopped singing. Burnside, as we have long known, is a fine accompanist, and Williams is one of the best of our younger baritones, with full-bodied, evenly produced tone and a firm, well-bound legato line. In these songs he is scrupulously clean in his placing, careful in phrasing and clear with his words. But he doesn’t tell us things like one who is experiencing them. Varcoe is better at that and if you come to Bryn Terfel in the Shakespeare songs (Let us garlands bring), then that’s a different matter altogether (‘Come away, death’ he softly invites, ‘Fly away, breath’ and it’s as though he opens his palm to let it escape, as vivid as that). These performances are musically fine (and it’s good to have the rarely heard, posthumously published songs, I said to Love). But they lead the imagination into concert hall or drawing-room – and Hardy (at least) is elsewhere.