It was time somebody took the music of Liza Lehmann seriously. Her worklist includes light operas, cantatas and song-cycles, but recordings have rarely ventured beyond the fairies at the bottom of her garden – a wickedly camp encore with the right singer. Neither that nor any of the songs from In a Persian Garden are featured here. The disc opens with four light numbers (En Septembre is akin to French operetta and The billet doux an Edwardian parlour song) and then plunges into Lehmann at her most serious.
The composer rated In Memoriam as one of her most substantial works. The portentous piano introduction, a solo number in its own right, sets the tone and scale of this ambitious song-cycle, which is to last over half an hour. Lehmann selected the words from Tennyson’s poem herself and fashioned a dozen songs of suitably varied mood. The music teeters on the brink of melodrama from time to time and ends literally with that, when Lehmann has her final text spoken over a high romantic accompaniment. But the best of the songs look forward to Vaughan Williams or Quilter and one or two – such as “When on my bed the moonlight falls” – achieve art-song status.
The other two works are neatly complementary. The five Cameos, written to ancient Greek love-songs in English translation, are not so strongly characterized, except the “Anacreontic” forging song with its sparks of fire in the accompaniment. The Selfish Giant shows Lehmann trying her hand at melodrama again, this time a reading of Oscar Wilde’s story over a piano accompaniment of vaguely fairy-tale sentimentality. A voice with a greater range than Henry Wickham’s baritone might have made a stronger champion for Lehmann’s music, but this disc at least gives a decent conspectus of what is on offer.'