Samuel Barber came from a singing background (his aunt was the famous contralto Louise Homer, her husband a popular song composer) and he was a gifted singer himself, a pupil of Emilio de Gogorza (Barber's recording of his own Dover Beach, which he withdrew lest it compete with that by another baritone whose work he admired, was a fine one). He wrote with great understanding of the voice, which is not to say that he made life easy for singers. The Hermit Songs and Despite and Still were written for Leontyne Price, and most of these songs require, if not a big voice, at any rate big performances. Although Roberta Alexander does not quite match Price's grand manner, she does have just the right force and urgent intensity for the titlesong of Despite and Still and the command of boldly dramatic declamation for ''I hear an army'' (from the James Joyce settings of Op. 10). She has charm, too (an exuberant account of Nuvoletta, that improbable but delightful setting of a passage from Finnegans Wake as a Menotti-like waltzsong) and thus can easily encompass the wide range of mood demanded by the Hermit Songs, from the purring contentedness of a monk sharing his cell with a companionable cat to a horrified, pitying contemplation of the crucifixion. What a fine cycle this is, one realizes in Alexander's graphically sung account, and how strange that it isn't regularly heard in recital programmes. Maybe simplicity of manner is not her strongest suit: her voice is not quite pure enough for the poignant plain-ness of the Hopkins setting (from Op. 13) ''A nun takes the veil'', but even here her sincerity is touching, and elsewhere she can be vividly expressive without ever disrupting the grace of Barber's vocal lines.
With the exception of a few arrangements and three late songs for low voice all of Barber's music for voice and piano is here. There is scarcely a weak song among them, and several are small masterpieces. Only one reservation: no texts are included apparently for legal reasons. Alexander's diction is excellent, but in music so vocally demanding as this one cannot expect to pick out every word. Many of the poems (Yeats, Housman, Robert Graves) are readily accessible in published collections, but some are not, and I still haven't managed to work out what Op. 18 No. 1, for example, is all about. The recording is close and a shade bright, emphasizing the odd sibilant from time to time, but the balance between voice and (excellent) pianist is well managed.'