Prior to writing this review I had heard this recording when it was being played in a Cornish tea-shop where my wife and I were taking shelter during an unexpected squall. Instead of the Chris de Burgh songs commonly featured in such places, we ate our pasties to repertoire more associated with the days of ''dainty teas with Hovis''! But there were reasons to pay attention—this was Jerome Kern all right, but not always the obvious numbers and the piano playing suggested a performer acutely aware of the rhythmic subtleties inherent in many of these tunes. I had an inkling that the pianist could be Eric Parkin for there was a suggestion from time to time of Billy Mayerl, whose piano works Parkin has recorded for Chandos. Snack over, I discovered that this shop also housed a record retailer, whose owner handed me a Parkin CD, not from Chandos this time but on Silva Screen. On it he plays his own arrangements of 21 Kern numbers, including a medley from Music in the Air, a Kern musical so rich in song it would be a pleasure to hear it complete in concert.
Parkin's approach to Kern is not that of a pianist like Andre Previn, brought up on the Art Tatum school, but rather an Englishman's view of the composer such as Richard Rodney Bennett presented to us for the Kern centenary year. This is essentially a lyrical view, unhurried, always at the service of the music and with that touch of rubato so beloved by pianists from the era in which these melodies were composed. Parkin doesn't attempt to dazzle us with keyboard pyrotechnics but, as I've suggested, his rhythmic control is everything, from the deft inlaying of the melody in the left-hand—a reminder that many of Kern's songs are set quite low in the voice—to the chord clusters he springs on us in the rhythmic ''Waltz in Swing Time'' and ''Let's begin''. Amongst other delights are his full range of the keyboard for ''More and more'', introduced by Deanna Durbin in Can't help singing, his caressing treatment of the gentle ''I have the room above her'', composed for Paul Robeson to sing in the 1936 Show Boat, and ''Sure thing'', beloved of many pianists, but a number that has never found a wider audience, possibly due to the unremarkable way it was staged and sung in the film, Cover Girl. Twenty-four hours after listening to this collection, I was still racking my brains to recall the untitled melody Parkin introduces into ''You're devastating''—now that it has come to me, let me put you out of a similar condition—the song is ''All through the day'' from Kern's last film score, Centennial Summer. The recording matches the mood of the playing to perfection.'