Terfel revisits English art song

Ten years ago, Bryn Terfel's The Vagabond, an album of songs by Vaughan Williams, Finzi, Ireland and Butterworth, may well have lured a new audience to the glories of English art song. If you were captivated in 1995, you'll certainly want Silent Noon, in which the Welsh baritone revisits the repertoire, increasing the composers to a dozen.

Is it my imagination or has Terfel's recent dalliance with Stephen Sondheim's demon barber liberated a certain theatrical edge in Michael Head's Money-O! and Frederick Keel's Port of many ships? Yet at the other end of the scale, his Sally Gardens is all tenderness and understatement.

Roger Quilter's Now sleeps the Crimson Petal has the immediacy of a Broadway ballad, sung from the heart, while the quiet, vibrant lyricism of Vaughan Williams' Silent Noon comes close to a transcendental experience.

Two Edward Lear limericks add quirky humour, set by that waggish Irishman Charles Villiers Stanford, doing his darnedest to cram as many quotes as possible from the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto into the minute or so of The Compleat Virtuoso.

The slight burr of Terfel's Welsh accent might alienate hard-core Ian Bostridge fans, but there is no denying the warmth and immediacy the baritone brings to everything he sings. A song such as Oliver Cromwell is put across with the conversational ease of someone spinning you a tale over a pint in the local pub.

With the exemplary Malcolm Martineau at the piano, and a finely toned, resonant recording made in London's Henry Wood Hall, this is to be filed under obligatory purchases.

If, after all this, your passion for English song is still not satisfied, Naxos' English Song may be the answer. Two CDs with 53 songs by 14 composers delivered by the likes of Felicity Lott, Christopher Maltman and Philip Langridge, at the price of a single full-price CD, is a bargain in any language.

It's one scrumptious sampler, ranging from the pastoral mysticism of Holst to the eminently wacky Lord Berners. And if, like me, your ears were tantalised with four songs by Liza (There are fairies at the bottom of our garden) Lehmann, there's a whole CD of her music to explore on Naxos 8.557118.

* Bryn Terfel, Silent Noon (Deutsche Grammophon 477 5339)

* English Song (Naxos 8.557559-60)