As in ‘The Vagabond’ (8/95), predecessor and companion-volume to this new recital, Bryn Terfel and Malcolm Martineau combine to persuade their listeners that these are the best songs in the world. Not that this reviewer needs much percussion – except perhaps in the case of Somervell’s A Shropshire Lad. It’s not surprising that Housman was so averse to having his poems set when this – a pioneering effort, along with Maud, in founding the English song-cycle – shows so little understanding of the poems in its music. The mental arithmetic in ‘Loveliest of trees’ is complacently factual; there is little relish for viewing the cherry blossom or regret that future circumstances will make it impossible. ‘In summertime on Bredon’, charmingly introduced, does manage a change to the minor for ‘the snows at Christmas’ but conveys scarcely an inkling of the life-changing experience. ‘On the idle hill of summer’ opts simple-mindedly for a call to arms.

That, of course, is no criticism of the performance which, as with almost everything else, is both old and sensitive, expert in accomplishment and judgement. The exception here is The foggy, foggy dew, which has too much nudging and underlining by Terfel, though Martineau’s easy-rider accompaniment, with its crafty low bass, is delightful. From the rest, let me draw attention to the two settings of Yeats’s The Cloths of Heaven, both exquisite. Lovely, too, is Ivor Gurney’s Sleep, with that striving, head-above- water, cry of ‘O, let my joys have some abiding’. If this is indeed the Terfel-Martineau English Songbook Volume 2, it deserves every welcome, and encourages us to hope for a third.