Ben Heppner follows the lead of many opera singers who have shown their enduring affection for the popular songs on which they cut their teeth. Heppner's chosen parlour songs are anything but the norm, though, since they date from a period when the parlour was all but gone. The earliest is Haydn Wood's Roses of Picardy of 1916. All the other songs in the collection are from the next 30 years or so, and almost half of them British, including a generous complement of five theatre songs by Noel Coward and Ivor Novello. All are quite beautifully done, making one wonder why we do not hear more of these two composers from operatic singers.
Most of the songs are North American, and I confess to being unfamiliar with the ballads among them. Devotees of Eileen Farrell, though, may treasure Ernest Charles's Let my song fill your heart, just as followers of Lawrence Tibbett, John Charles Thomas and Nelson Eddy may do with Mana-Zucca's I love life. What matters is the affection Heppner displays for all the music, putting his delightful tenor voice entirely at its service and never going remotely over the top. Equal praise goes to the superbly stylish orchestrations of Jonathan Tunick, a pupil of Vittorio Giannini, whose brief, Wagnerian Sing to my heart a song is another of the unfamiliar numbers that make this a collection appealing as much for its unusual content as for its unusual elegance of performance.'