SOMM Recordings continues its acclaimed championing of the music of Charles Villiers Stanford with Cushendall, a captivating collection of his Irish song cycles by mezzo-soprano Sharon Carty, baritone Benjamin Russell and pianist Finghin Collins. Twelve first recordings include the seven-part Cushendall, a trio of Blarney Ballads, and two songs from Stanford’s opera Shamus O’Brien. Composed during a period of political turbulence in his native Ireland, the Irish song cycles, Stanford’s biographer Jeremy Dibble comments in his authoritative notes, “undoubtedly articulate an increasing sense of regret, isolation and personal nostalgia [for what] was no longer the country and home he had known from his youth”. Setting poems by Ulster-Scots poet John Stevenson, Cushendall evokes the landscape and way of life on Antrim’s coastline in some of Stanford’s most sophisticated music with allusions to Irish folksongs and Wagner’s Die Walküre. A Fire of Turf sets Winifred Letts’ reflections on “the passing seasons of the year… an analogy with the protagonist’s recollection of his past life… memories kept alive by the glowing warmth of the turf”. A Sheaf of Songs from Leinster contains six variegated songs, again setting Letts; the Blarney Ballads delightfully wicked lampoons of Britain’s then Prime Minister, Gladstone; the highly popular Shamus O’Brien providing two contrasting arias.