Head: Songs

Ailish Tynan (soprano), Catherine Wyn-Rogers (mezzo soprano), Roderick Williams (baritone), Christopher Glynn (piano) Hyperion CDA 67899***

Michael Head (1900-76) was not only a composer who liked to perform his songs to his own accompaniment, but also a teacher (professor of piano at the Royal Academy of Music in London) and an adjudicator (he died on a tour in South Africa). His songs were conceived in a kind of alternative musical universe, deaf to the music that characterised his time, and intended almost as an arty continuation of the world of Edwardian ballads. As a singer and pianist, Head knew how to write gratefully for voice and keyboard, and on this collection of 27 songs (around a quarter of his total output) soprano Ailish Tynan and baritone Roderick Williams tune in to his vein of nostalgia (involving lines like "I fell in love with a Limehouse las") more sympathetically than mezzo soprano Catherine Wyn-Rogers. url.ie/4qdb