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Yet it would seem to me that the classical song, close relative to the folksong, and forerunner of the modern pop song, should satisfy closely the fashionable criterion of “accessibility”. A typical classical song has a clear structure and message, and being, like most pop songs, of two to four minutes’ duration, is unlikely to exceed the attention span of the modern listener (myself included).

This album is therefore aimed not only at the devotee of classical song, but at anyone who has ever enjoyed listening to songs or poems of any sort. Prior knowledge or specialist insight should not be a requirement for their enjoyment, since it is always the responsibility of the performers to make sure that their performance speaks to all-comers.

In choosing to group our selection of songs around the theme of “Songs of the Soul”, we hope that we have managed to produce a coherent set of thought-provoking pieces. The recordings came from a week of sessions, which we approached with open minds and no fixed ideas as to interpretation, and our hope is that the recordings capture this spirit of adventurous dialogue from which they emerged.

These songs speak more clearly for themselves that anything I could write here on their behalf, and so I will say no more about their content other than that they are intended to work as a set with a continuous thread running through them, and also as free-standing individual poems set to music, as they are likely to be heard by listeners with mp3 players set to Shuffle mode.