''Oh! tell me, Harper, wherefore flow Thy wayward notes of wail and woe?'' Wherefore indeed? Beethoven ephemera, especially when it issues from the Celtic twilight, really does need to be presented more stylishly than this.
Marjanna Kweksilber and four Dutch chamber musician colleagues have gathered together a handful of Beethoven's Werke ohne opuszahl (of which there are, incidentally, more than 200). They have interspersed them with eight particularly gloomy songs of Caledonia and Erin, the product of that indefatigable entrepreneur, George Thomson of Edinburgh, whose enterprises have been recently surveyed here in a new Hyperion recording of Haydn's Welsh folk-song arrangements (10/91).
Although Kweksilber's accent is impeccable, her voice itself lacks the promise of her surname. Her somewhat matronly tones and lack of any real feel for the melodic contour of these songs, combined with the almost unchanging expressive progress, on behalf of both Beethoven and his performers, through each successive strophe, makes these ditties something of an endurance test.
James Hogg's Bonnie laddie thumps along, relieved momentarily by the tripping fortepiano part of ''Lovely Mary Morison'' (O Mary, at thy window be) and the passing inspiration of Faithfu' Johnie. But too often, violin and cello merely track the voice part, and when it comes to Sir Walter Scott's Irish songs, everyone seems to give up.
The happiest moments on this disc are the little single-movement (Allegretto) piano trio which Beethoven wrote for the 10 - year - old Maximiliane Brentano (a real incentive for anyone to do his practice, and Stanley Hoogland has clearly done his) and the skittish variations on Rule Britannia (how much more fun, though, on a real piano). The six Landlerische Tanze for two violins and cello, from which the B flat comes, are potboilers which scarcely reach simmering point.'