The Songs (Incls 'songs of a Wayfarer', 'sea Fever' & 'three Thomas Hardy Songs')

Although John Ireland wrote concerted chamber music, orchestral works and choral pieces he devoted much of his long creative career to piano music and songs, and it is in these works that the essential Ireland ismost comprehensively to be found - they give the fullest picture of his multifarious musical personality and creative range. The piano, after all, was his instrument and the medium of his most self-revealing thought - we hear this also in his songs since poetry for him, who had a nice and searching taste in literature, must necessarily be interpreted by both participants in a song