John Ireland’s piano music, intriguingly titled, exudes a deeply personal, bittersweet fragrance. The sense of autobiography is strong. Musicians of a more robust nature or temperament may come to discard once-treasured memories as frail or ephemeral but for Ireland such moments possessed a timeless validity or epiphany. Nostalgia is his keynote, his pantheistic and wistful Gallic delicacy subsumed into a wholly English reticence. Again, there is a strong feeling of how a purely local influence (Pangbourne and the Thames Valley in The towing-path, Le Fauvic beach, Jersey in ‘The Island Spell’, to take two examples) are transcended to become statements of a wider poetic import.
The large-scale Rhapsody, with its powerful Faurean overtones, is relished by John Lenehan, a strong and sympathetic interpreter, and time and again he makes you wonder at works aptly described as ‘some of the most appealing English piano music written this century, too long neglected.’ Try him in the Decorations (including ‘Island Spell’ which, pace Debussy, is more l’isle triste than joyeuse) and you will discover a rich compensation for a less than radiant account of the delectable ‘April’ from Two Pieces, 1924-5 (the opening, in particular, is disappointingly plain). But if you can sometimes imagine other pianists ‘opening out’ more generously, Lenehan’s playing is of a special integrity and musicianship. Naxos’s recordings are fine and I, for one, am already looking forward to Volume 3.'