Kern: Bill

A welcome reissue of a disc capturing one of the wittier evenings at London’s Wigmore Hall. For anyone who wasn’t there on 17 June 1988, this disc is joyous discovery, where Schoenberg rubs shoulders with Cole Porter, Madeleine Dring with Gershwin, while Jeremy Nicholas’s brilliantly punning pieces prove that the traditions of Flanders & Swann are alive and well; where you can feast on oysters and cottage cheese, squashed tomato sandwiches and kippers, where bald men acquire unlikely headgear in the name of seduction, where love is pursued, gained, lost or (worse) simply becomes dull and where fairies do indeed live at the bottom of the garden. A delicious concoction, performed with piquancy and tenderness by Sarah Walker and Roger Vignoles.