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Much of Percy Grainger's output for solo voice and piano was arrangements of folk songs he had collected, arrangements which are often as original in the liberties they take as they are moving in the emotional content they add. Stephen Varcoe has the measure of this music, and his performance of the seven-minute ballad "Hard-hearted Barb'ra Ellen" is particularly impressive in its shifts of emotion; Penelope Thwaites's admirable accompaniment brings out the deliberately over-the-top aspects of a setting which Grainger, who somewhat disapproved of the ballad's theme of lovers united in death rather than consummation, wrote slightly with his tongue in his cheek. Most of the songs are given without any complicating irony; Varcoe and Thwaites are affectingly simple in "Willow, Willow". There are some impressive Kipling settings here as well--"Soldier, soldier, home from the wars" is set simply, almost indeed as if it were another folk-song. Varcoe's characterisation of the evasive answers the dead soldier's friend gives his sweetheart makes Kipling's mock cockney almost delicate, and Thwaites is simple here; sometimes less is more. --
Roz Kaveney