The NMC Songbook

*****

The NMC Songbook (NMC, through Ode Records)

Verdict: A birthday garland of 96 songs proves that British composers still have hale and hearty voices.

NMC Records has always had an unswerving brief: to bring the finest recordings of the best of British contemporary classical music to as wide an audience as possible.

So how better to celebrate its 20th anniversary than with a four-CD set of 96 songs, with composers ranging from the senior brigade of Harrison Birtwistle, Peter Maxwell Davies and Thea Musgrave to established 30-somethings like Tansy Davies and Joseph Phibbs.

The NMC Songbook is an endlessly absorbing kaleidoscope of words and music with tunes put to the words of Blake and Shakespeare at one end of the spectrum right through to Marc-Anthony Turnage's setting of a rowdy boys' football chant.

Some, such as Roxanna Panufnik's That Mighty Heart, are frankly lyrical; others, like Gerald Barry reciting the Lady Bracknell/Jack encounter from Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest to his own piano, are downright quirky.

David Bedford blends boogie and ballad for Kipling's The Roman Centurion's Song, while Michael Berkeley's Echo poignantly tributes that eternal boulevardier, Francis Poulenc.

Accompaniments range from traditional piano to electronics and occasionally singers are on their own, as in Simon Bainbridge's intensely gauged duet on Shakespeare's Shall I Compare Thee.

New Zealanders can be proud that our own Lyell Cresswell is his waggish self in A Recipe for Whisky for baritone and woodblocks.

And, if a song doesn't quite measure up (Peter Maxwell Davies' Labyrinth to Light piped by a boy soprano certainly left me cold), don't fear; you'll be ensnared again by the next.

Perfect, too, are the strolling instrumental interludes - Colin Matthews toying on the Tudor side with music by Thomas Morley, calling on various combinations of harp, harpsichord, guitar, marimba and two pianos.

With the team of fine singers including names like Claire Booth, James Bowman, Michael Chance and Roderick Williams, this is compulsive listening, surveying NMC's past two decades and proving British music is alive, well and fuelled for the future. William Dart