This disc represents a revival of music that has been virtually forgotten except in circles directly connected to its composer.
Muriel Herbert, born in 1897, studied with
Charles Stanford and was also encouraged by
Roger Quilter, with whom she had the bad luck to fall in love (he was gay). She won praise for her youthful works, but marriage and childbirth restricted her output at the crucial point where she would have been positioned for revival once modernist strictures were thrown off.
Herbert is almost a miniaturist; many of the 26 songs included on this album are under two minutes long, and the six Children's Songs (tracks 23-28) are under a minute. Setting texts mostly from the ranks of classic English and Irish poetry,
Herbert sticks close to the rhythm of the text, with few repetitions of instrumental matter. Her harmonic language is tonal, with splashes of Impressionist paint often dropped in with lovely effect in the middle of a line. She is at her best when the text pushes her in a certain direction and the concision of her thinking comes into relief: sample the modal-to-tonal setting of
Yeats' "The Lake Isle at Innisfree" (track 30), or the delightful Children's Songs, which include original settings of some familiar nursery rhymes. The large number of fairly similar short songs can be a lot to take in one sitting, but the disc is, after all, meant as a collection of the composer's work. Tenor
James Gilchrist is marvelously clear in articulation; texts are given in English only, but with
Gilchrist you won't even need the printed texts. He is in every respect ideal for a project of this kind, and soprano
Ailish Tynan is hardly less so; she avoids the trap of letting any of the material seem cute. Recommended for devotees of interwar British music or of music by women composers.