Hope the Hornblower (pre-1911)

Sea Fever (1913)

Tutto è sciolto (1932)

When Lights go rolling round the Sky (c 1911)

Great Things (1925)

Although there was a revival of interest in Ireland round the centenary of his birth in 1979, it didn’t last long. Indeed, less of his music is heard now than at any time since his death. Even Sea Fever, which was at one time of one of the most popular not only of his own but of all British songs - though the author of the words didn’t much like it - seems to have fallen out of favour. So the present selection - including three cheerful early songs, Sea Fever itself, and a sensitive product of his maturity - is a timely if necessarily limited reminder of Ireland’s genius in an area in which, between the wars above all, he excelled.

His setting of Sir Henry Newbolt’s Hope the Hornblower, which was written some time before 1911, is rather more than the rollicking hunting song it at first seems to be. Apart from such immediate attractions as the exhilarating rhythm of the piano accompaniment and a vocal line so aptly shaped to the natural inflection of the words, there are the subtle changes in harmony and rhythm which have an oddly, if briefly chilling effect at “Ask not yet till the day be dead” at the beginning of the third stanza.

Sir John Masefield’s problem with Ireland’s setting of Sea Fever was not the royalties it brought him but the “dirge-like” impression given when it was performed at the tempo prescribed by the composer. He was happy only when it was sung with eager urgency. Ireland, on the other hand, firmly believed that his Lento tempo was right and didn’t like the song taken too quickly. So what is a singer to do?

Tutto è sciolto, Ireland’s contribution to “The Joyce Book” - a collection of settings by thirteen different composers of texts from “Pomes Penyeach” - seems to come from a different age. Written in 1932, it is remarkable for its linear economy and the modest but exquisitely chosen harmonies reflecting the twilit colouring of Joyce’s words. The operatic derivation of the Italian title of the poem, which comes from Elvino’s lament in the second act of La Sonnambula, clearly did not tempt Ireland into emulating Bellini.

When Lights go rolling round the sky - one of three Ireland settings from about 1911 of words by the now forgotten James Vila Blake - is in much the same vein as Hope the Hornblower, with a romping rhythmic accompaniment and a hearty vocal line. Again, the genius is in the detail, in the precisely registered changes of atmosphere in the more lyrical lines that come between the irrepressible first stanza and its two repeats.

One of Ireland’s favourite poets, alongside Housman and the two Rossettis among others, was Thomas Hardy. Great Things was written in 1925 and it was presumably the affinity he felt with the poet in this case that encouraged him to undertake his Hardy cycle early in the following year. To begin with not very different from Hope the Hornblower and When lights go rolling round the sky, except that the piano accompaniment is even more exuberant in its tipsy kind of way, Great Things is quite masterful in its effortless accommodation of the changing moods of Hardy’s not entirely reckless poem.