Ending with the Sonata, the programme seems exactly right; for here Berkeley writes with a wider and deeper aim than elsewhere on the record. The remaining music is always elegant (a word it is almost impossible to avoid using when discussing this composer), and sometimes entertaining, but largely without the more serious intention of the Sonata. Elegance is of course much to many listeners' taste (it certainly is to my own), and in music it surely grows in enjoyability the scarcer on the ground the quality becomes in daily life.
At all events, here it is in plentiful supply, perhaps especially in the two sets of pieces, Opp. 2 and 4. In the Polka, less certainly so; in the Mazurkas perhaps, yes, in some minor degree in that they are a conscious tribute to Chopin; in Paysage, a tribute to the French countryside, perhaps less than you would expect. By the time the Preludes, in something of a concert style, are reached (on the record) a sterner voice is in evidence, and finally there is the Sonata. This all adds up to a splendid, and a splendidly varied programme.
Christopher Headington was in earlier days a composition pupil of Berkeley, and he communicates with great skill the music that he so fully understands. He also communicates this understanding in the most informative notes he in fact wrote for the disc, although for some reason no printed attribution to him is made.'