KEY POINTS:
Canadian baritone Gerald Finley and English pianist Julius Drake are building up a much-appreciated Great American Songbook on Hyperion Records.
Gershwin, Kern and Rodgers may be yet to come; but, for the moment, there is ample reason for contentment with a marvellous set of Samuel Barber songs and a second instalment of Charles Ives, with 30 songs reaffirming Ives' unpredictable lyrical genius.
It would be difficult to imagine two more diametrically opposed men. One was gay, the other a resolute homophobe; one has maintained a firm place in the concert hall through his neo-romantic concertos, the other can still terrify with his bristling idiosyncratic avant-garderie.
Both, however, had a unique gift when it came to setting words. I should imagine that Barber, a baritone himself who recorded his own Dover Beach, would be totally won over by Finley's passionate singing of the piece, to the exemplary and sympathetic strings of the Aronowitz Ensemble.
This most cosmopolitan of composers would also be charmed by the Canadian's suave French in his Melodies Passageres, and the witty delivery of medieval texts in the Hermit Songs.
And what but the stoniest of hearts could resist the two men, with the help of Hyperion's recording engineers, in Barber at his most romantic in James Agee's Sure On This Shining Night?
Finley and Drake gave us their first indispensable set of Ives songs three years ago. Romanzo di Central Park offers another 30, with a title song that is a wicked send-up of Victor Herbert at his most sentimental, complete with soupy violin from Magnus Johnston.
Sentiment and the sentimental are all around and sometimes it is genuine Americana. In the Alley is like a music hall ballad while Songs My Mother Taught Me rivals Dvorak's song of the same title in its catchiness.
By the 1920s, Two Little Flowers finds him refining his earlier drawing-room style into something leaner and more emotionally catching.
If you like Ives the cantankerous, rowdy tub thumper, there is The Circus Band and the riotously patriotic They Are There; Finley and Drake dish them out with just the gusto they need. Volume three is impatiently awaited.
* Gerald Finley and Julius Drake: Songs by Samuel Barber (Hyperion CDA 67528)
* Gerald Finley: Romanzo di Central Park: Songs by Charles Ives (Hyperion CDA 67644, both through Ode Records)
