Often this kind of recital disc seems to bring out the worst in everybody concerned, including your reviewer, whose metabolism turns an overdose of sugar into acid. It isn’t that the notion of High Art is outraged, and it certainly is not the effect of an inbuilt objection to what is popular, let alone what is simple: rather that so often simplicity is precisely what is missing and a luxury of self-conscious beautifying is brought in. On the whole that is not so in this instance. On the whole, good taste has known where to draw the line, and there is much that gives pleasure.

Terfel himself has the gift to be simple and, in something almost amounting to genius, the gift of communication. With him, the words live and become vivid: in the very song Simple Gifts there’s a touch of defiance in ‘We shan’t be ashamed’ and ‘the valley of love and delight’ does indeed light up. He sings I’ll walk beside you as a song of promise, looking to the future. He frequently uses a soft, intimate voice, in a modern manner but not as a crooner. Yet I fear there is also a loss in his ‘real’ singing and it shows up in the duets with Simon Keenlyside, who produces with traditional solid resonance and is all the better for it. Occasionally the arrangements overreach themselves – but then how delightful to find that Morning has Broken goes not to a laid-back ‘stay-in-bed, sleepy head’ motion but to a wide-awake spring-day allegro.

-- John Steane, Gramophone [11/2005]