“There can be little doubt that he is the most important British song composer since Purcell.” Michael Pilkington’s notes on Warlock make this claim, and it prompts a hope that Collins’s English Song series, so promisingly begun with Vaughan Williams (12/96) and Walton (10/97), may eventually come up with Warlock Vol. 2, for there is a good deal more where this came from. Yet, that having been said, let me be regretfully frank and personal: I didn’t enjoy it. For this sad state of affairs the singing is partly responsible. But Warlock can be trying. It is not the insistent chromaticism in itself, or what seems a nerveless meandering style (as in And wilt thou leave me thus?, which Pilkington considers “one of the finest songs he ever wrote”), or the loud heartiness of the rumtum-stumpledom songs that complement the melancholic: there is a feeling about so many of these songs which says “This is Warlock alright and no doubt, yet Warlock is really something else”.
The Curlew certainly is essential Warlock, or one side of him. Its bleak beauty is well caught in this performance, in which the string quartet and woodwind players finely set off the voice. Adrian Thompson’s tenor is by no means a beautiful instrument but it is not too evidently unsuited here. In most of the other songs I find it unsympathetic, too often hard in quality and uneven in production. At first, Christopher Maltman’s baritone offers a pleasant alternative, but then it too lapses into a kind of compromised firmness: the notes on “love (“lady love”) in Peter Warlock’s Fancy weaken confidence, and “Along the stream” (from Saudades) and Bethlehem Down show further that this is not really even production – not as (say) Thomas Allen is even. Warlock may not seem to call especially for beautiful tone and smoothness, but in proportion to the sourer or spikier elements in his own writing he does benefit from sheer beauty in the singer (The Curlew, for instance, is to my mind far more moving, as well as more beautiful, in Ian Partridge’s recording). Not all will share these priorities, and certainly the singers here pay all due attention to notes and words, while John Constable’s accompaniments are a pleasure throughout. Several songs are new to the Gramophone Database; the recorded sound is fine.'