Though Ireland’s settings of Housman come first and give the disc its title, they are not the most attractive items in the programme, nor do they introduce Pears’s voice in a way most likely to commend it to those who know of the famous singer by repute but perhaps never heard him in the flesh and have up to now missed him on record (I take it that to perform such an introduction is part of this disc’s purpose as the notes give an outline of his career but say nothing about the songs themselves). Stronger and more immediately impressive in performance is the group by Frank Bridge, with his particularly lovely setting of Yeats’s When you are old and gray and full of sleep and the jaunty, catchy So perverse. The cycle by Alan Bush, Voices of the Prophets, gives the recital a firm centre, with its strongly committed treatment of politically correct (and in this instance none the worse) passages from Isaiah, Milton, Blake and Peter Blackman. Warlock’s Piggesnie is a delightful encore-song, Grainger’s Bold William Taylor another, the one having Pears charmingly managing each verse in a single breath, the other a fine example of his vividness in narrative and dialogue. Three excellent pianists accompany him.
Back to the booklet. Given that it is limited to four pages, one the cover and the middle ‘spread’ occupied by the brief note on Pears, why should the back-page be a list of contents identical to that on the back of the jewel-case when the programme calls aloud for annotation however brief? One further point: the 1964 LP also contained two of Pears’s most valuable contributions to this repertoire on record, Richard Rodney Bennett’s Tom o’Bedlam’s Song and Priaulx Rainier’s Cycle for Declamation. Neither of them is on CD at present and both are candidates for reissue.'