Succumb to Lemalu's magic

A few phrases into his new CD, Jonathan Lemalu will have you completely in his spell.

"Who is Sylvia? What is she?" are the opening lines of the Shakespeare lyric, as set by Roger Quilter, and you will find yourself transfixed by the New Zealand baritone and his pianist Malcolm Martineau.

Lemalu has a robust sympathy for the much-maligned British art song and Love Blows As the Winter Blows is a full-length follow-up to the tantalising tastes of Ireland, Finzi and Head he offered on his 2002 debut album.

The baritone is in fine voice, sturdy when it's time to rollick in Ireland's When Lights Go Rolling Round the Sky, although the agility of Finzi's It Was a Lover and His Lass seems hard-won.

In song after song, it is the symbiotic relationship between the artists that shines through. In Britten's A Song of Enchantment, Lemalu does so much with the merest whisper of a breath and Martineau's piano seems to sigh in his wake.

Lemalu knows the value of restraint and, through this, he makes the bleak poeticism of Samuel Barber's Dover Beach doubly heartrending, in perfect accord with the Belcea Quartet behind him.

The Belcea musicians are also on George Butterworth's cycle, Love Blows As The Wind Blows, the pastoral melancholy of which is not helped by a extraordinary recording botch at around 1'25" in its second song.

Lemalu is a man of many emotions, and humour is certainly one of them. Richard Rodney Bennett's Songs Before Sleep, written expressly for the baritone, are knowing, nudging lullabies. The Mouse and the Bumblebee scurries away investigating bagpiping cats and gives a new twist to the concept of mixed marriage; As I Walked By Myself is an artless ballad in search of a Broadway show. Lemalu triumphs in both.

These are most attractive works. Why were all six songs not included on the recording?

William Bolcom's cabaret songs have always been popular Lemalu encores and Black Max is a miracle of streetwise sophistication.

Perhaps some may find George, the tale of a Puccini-singing drag queen killed by rough trade, a little questionable - I certainly did - but the contemplative spirituality of Waitin is more than adequate appeasement.

* Jonathan Lemalu, Love Blows As the Wind Blows (EMI 58076).