The Dicky Bird & The Owl: Victorian Songs and Ballads

Here is a lovely and underrated album by André Previn, this time at the piano and surrounded by Robert Tear and Benjamin Luxon, two key figures of British vocal art. The off-the-beaten-track program is centered on light songs from the mid and late 19th-century, a period often undeservedly regarded as an age of fall for British music. This recording reveals the vitality of the singing tradition of that time with delightful melodies by Sullivan or Balfe, and other composers largely forgotten such as John Liptrot Hatton or Charles Dibdin.