Folk music collections such as this are not nearly as simple to bring off as they might seem. Percy Grainger’s folk song arrangements don’t have the profile of Bartók’s and Britten’s; Grainger gains credibility for working from his own field recordings but perhaps loses a bit because his treatments can be highly interventionist. One of my favourites in this collection is ‘Died for love’, with a typically wistful British vocal line about a fairly extreme death wish accompanied by a rippling ostinato that suggests a larger world that passes by the song’s agonising protagonist unnoticed. More frankly descriptive touches such as the dissonant tolling bells in ‘Hard hearted Barb’ra (H)Ellen’ may be compelling on their own terms but sit less well in ethnomusicology circles.

The 18 selections mix solo piano and vocal/piano folk song settings, including ‘Bold William Taylor’, ‘The pretty maid milkin’ her cow’, ‘The Sprig of Thyme’ and more academic titles such as ‘Irish Tune from County Derry’, which is in fact ‘Danny Boy’ or ‘Londonderry Air’. Pianist Christopher Glynn has written notes in which thoughtful, admiring insights abound but which sometimes interpret Grainger’s compositional reimagining in operatic terms that perhaps oversell the pieces, at least in his performances.

Glynn gives Grainger the Urtext treatment at the keyboard, regarding the music with a soft-spoken reverence that has the opposite of the intended effect: the music can seem inconsequential. Grainger’s own high-spirited recorded performances or the hearty approach to choral works taken by John Eliot Gardiner on his ‘Danny Boy’ album (Philips, 4/96) are not the only ways to go with this music. But they’re preferable to Glynn’s deliberate tempos, sentimental ritards at the final cadences and unusually long pauses between songs that leave you thinking, ‘Can we please get on with it?’

Claire Booth’s girlish soprano might seem appropriate for folk song, though her fast, quick vibrato obscures her diction, sometimes for entire stanzas, which is a particular problem with the more regional dialects that make sense when articulated clearly but are less comprehensible when read in the accompanying booklet. The engineering is the final culprit – distant microphone placement adds to the overall effect of remote, impersonal performances of music that has the power to enter your bloodstream. No clear-cut alternative is available since Grainger tends to be programmed – sensibly – in mixed-composer anthologies, such as Felicity Lott’s adorable ‘Favourite English Songs’ (Chandos, 7/90).