Nicky Spence, tenor, Malcolm Martineau, piano

RESONUS RES10116        57’17

If the opening songs are familiar, by far the most interesting are the later, more modern items. Settings by Geoffrey Bush and Alex Woolf are stimulating, but I really enjoyed the three John Dankworth settings taken from Shakespeare and all that Jazz originally recorded with Cleo Laine back in the late sixties. Nicky Spence captures the tongue-in-cheek character of the settings very well and this leads to a splendid jazz arrangement of Schubert’s Hark, hark the lark by Peter Dickinson.

This is not to imply that the Quilter, Britten and Chausson settings lack merit, more that it is a pleasure to find so wide a range of styles in response to the same texts. A pity, possibly, not to have included any of the fine settings I have heard over the years from the composers of the Royal Shakespeare Company, but they may be asking too much. Worth investigating and enjoying. BH