Gamut Classics are to be congratulated for bringing to our attention this well-balanced, enthusiastically performed compilation of songs and chamber music from the near-forgotten Rebecca Clarke, chamber musician and composer of the 1920s.
Clarke's folk-song settings prove themselves healthy rivals to those of Britten: Jonathan Rees revels in the cunning of their violin accompaniments. The composer's own settings, though, show little of the originality of a Britten or a Tippett: hers, generally speaking, is the more comfortable, syllabic way of a Quilter or a Warlock. Her moulding of intonation and inflexion, though, is minutely sensitive, and her matching of it to harmonic direction and pitch register both assured and powerful.
She takes on Blake and Yeats fearlessly. Her Tiger burns bright with a latent Expressionism which she was never really to develop: her Infant Joy, on the other hand, soon becomes harmonically complacent. Her writing becomes more potent within the folk-derived contours of her Yeats settings: the simple, telling line of A Dream and the terse, direct address of To an isle in the Water are appreciated and powerfully realized by these performers.
Clarke's single response to her contemporary, the astringently feminist writer and poet Anne Wickham, is disappointing. The Cherry Blossom Wand is both Wickham and Clarke at their most bland. No less disappointing is the somewhat cavalier design and presentation of the disc: A. E. Houseman (sic) is constantly mis-spelt, and three English and three Irish folk-songs (including, hilariously, ''The Tailor and the Mouse'') are mistakenly attributed to him.'