Reynaldo Hahn's lifestyle as a boulevard dandy, darling of the salons and bosom friend of Proust has led to some under-valuation of his musical worth. A German critic (who presumably didn't know his operetta Ciboulette and wouldn't have appreciated its delicate charm anyway) wrote loftily of his ''grinding out [sic] operettas and little ballads in limitless quantities''—in fact he wrote about the same number of melodies as Debussy, and far fewer than Faure; and the Times critic has dismissed the most famous, Si mes vers avaient des ailes, as ''typical fin-de-siecle sentimentality'' (did he write anything so beautifully crafted at the age of 13?). There may indeed be a whiff of the salon in some of the 22 songs here—not altogether surprising in a favourite pupil of Massenet's—but his range is wider than he is often given credit for, and his settings of Verlaine in particular offer interesting contrasts to those by composers of greater standing. The harmonic subtlety of L'air, the shimmering atmosphere of Les etoiles, the effective simple piano pattern of Infidelite, the pathos of D'une prison are decidedly not the work of some scented dilettante.
Martyn Hill shows a true understanding of the style, for the most part elegantly intimate but expanding to emotional climaxes in such songs as La chere blessure and conveying lyrical ecstasy in ''Tous deux'' (Chansons grises), and in Graham Johnson he has the most sensitive and musicianly of partners, with a striking command of keyboard colour. The recording is first class.'