This now becomes the first complete, or almost complete version of the cycle. Its history is curious. Recorded by Victor in 1933, it was not issued at the time. After Crooks had retired in 1946, the company looked for unissued material by the tenor and uncovered the cycle. Even then they issued only 12 songs (on six shellac sides). Crooks’s granddaughter had the remaining test pressings passed by the singer, so Claremont have now been able to assemble a whole version, minus the start of “Pause”, where there was a ‘bite’ out of the relevant record. In addition, Crooks omits a few verses in the strophic songs.
In spite of a free way with tempo and rhythms, a couple of very slow speeds, generous ritenutos at cadential phrases, quirky German (strange in a singer who began his career in Germany) and a generally rather extrovert approach, the performance is fascinating. Crooks’s voice, resembling a kind of admixture of McCormack (who might have sounded like this had he recorded the work) and Simoneau, has a youthful patina wholly appropriate to the task in hand and he interprets the cycle in a sincere, generous-hearted manner without a hint of the over-sophistication that sometimes mars readings by tenors today. Time and again I found myself moved by the genuine artlessness of the 33-year-old tenor, so apt to the youth’s vulnerable nature, and his fresh, natural timbre.
Crooks’s partner is no great asset and he’s backwardly recorded in relation to the voice, which itself rings out truly. The bonus items give us a taste of Crooks’s repertory as a recitalist, technically accomplished Handel and neatly delivered songs, the tone by 1940 appreciably darker than seven years earlier.'