This remastered collection of British folk song arrangements dwells on nostalgia for “a lost, much gentler era” as expressed in “folk songs of classical beauty”. But the era it captures is not that of the original folk traditions but that of the civilising arrangements in which 20th-century composers clothed them: cut-glass accents and deftly anachronistic piano accompaniments. There’s a flash of temperament in Steuart Wilson’s version of Rio Grande, and tremulous emotion in Conchita Supervía singing Oh No, John!, and one orchestral rarity in Adrian Boult’s 1920 version of A Shropshire Lad. The rest is a touching reminder of a frightfully polite age.
