This is a souvenir of what was obviously a jolly even- ing, a cabaret of songs about London presented as part of the Spitalfields Festival in 2002, and recreated for this recording at the Savage Club. The main item on the programme is Jonathan Dove’s Five Am’rous Sighs, a song-cycle on poems by Lady Mary Wortley Montague and Matthew Prior. The theme is that of love gone wrong, the words elegantly underlined by Dove’s music, with just a hint of 18th-century pastiche.There is such a wealth of material to be rediscovered by light-music composers of the late 19th and 20th centuries, and there are some gems here, which if familiar to specialists, will be new to many listeners. Lionel Monckton’s ‘Chalk Farm to Camberwell Green’ from Bric-à-Brac (1915), was composed for Monckton’s wife, Gertie Millar. Catherine Bott gives it rather more voice than Millar does on her famous recording (PMC7145 – nla). Conversely, Bott talks Fraser-Simson’s setting of AA Milne’s They’re changing guard at Buckingham Palace a good deal more than its originator. Wimbledon by Kit and the Widow is a cautionary tale about road rage after the tennis tournament, which Bott delivers in an authentic ‘refined’ accent. Joyce Grenfell’s collaboration with Donald Swann, Joyful noise is a satire on the work of an amateur chorus, heroic but sad.

David Owen Norris provides spirited accompaniments and also sings Billy Mayerl’s Mayfair Merry-go-round, as well as joining Bott in the duet from Sandy Wilson’s The Boy Friend. Two contrasting music-hall songs are both surprises. Harry Dacre’s melancholy waltz, While London’s sleeping describes the plight of the homeless and starving. Victorian Londoners were, as Bott writes in her introduction, ‘less afraid of sentiment’. Yet they were also heartily cynical about romance, and Take me in a taxi, Joe by AJ Mills and Bennett Scott, a number from the repertoire of Vesta Victoria, is my favourite item here.

The inevitable A nightingale sang in Berkeley Square, London pride and A foggy day provide the familiar nostalgic views of town, countered by Richard Rodney Bennett’s Let’s go and live in the country. Bott writes that there don’t seem to be enough songs about London’s river, and offers only Ewan MacColl’s Sweet Thames, flow softly. It would be interesting to hear, though, Howard Paul’s Up the Thames to Richmond, Philip Braham’s The gay river, Christiné’s All along the dear old tow path and James W Tate’s Row me on the river, Romeo – there must be loads of others – maybe that should be the next project?