Music / A Song Each Way, David Greco and Roland Peelman, Wesley Music Centre, November 16. Reviewed by HELEN MUSA.

On a breathtakingly busy afternoon in the Canberra concert calendar, I caught Art Song Canberra’s finale for the year, a cleverly programmed concert exploring the commonalities of love.

Performed by feted baritone David Greco with Roland Peelman at the piano, the program allowed numbers to run into each other so they seemed to flow as one, revealing love’s many faces – “a song to laugh and a song to weep… a song each way,” as they put it.

Beginning quite solemnly with Brahms’ Ich schell mein Horn ins Jammertal (“I sound my horn in a vale of tears”), followed quickly by Purcell’s Music for a While, it took Greco a moment to settle fully into the swing of things.

That happened with the first of three songs by Kurt Weill, I’m a Stranger Here Myself, with laconic words by Ogden Nash and jaunty support from Peelman. Greco’s affected passion was punctuated by a high falsetto for emphasis.

Vaughan Williams’ Love-Song followed, a kind of answer to the previous number.

Brahms dominated the afternoon, but not everything was as sober as the opening. Greco was quick to remind us that folk songs are a form of art song too, demonstrated in a cheeky number, Vain Serenade, set by Brahms to a folk text from the Lower Rhine region — a sort of 19th-century version of Baby, It’s Cold Outside, in which a young man knocks on a young woman’s door only to be firmly told to go home.

Weill’s American-period songs included the sad, gentle Speak Low, sung by Greco with a light and quick touch, followed by the contrasting Vaughan Williams number Tired. Love, after all, can be exhausting.

During interval, Art Song Canberra president Ditta Zizi rose to outline the coming season before it was time to return to another folk-inspired song, this one from Dublin, I Will Walk with My Love, and then a complete change of tone with the popular These Foolish Things, where Greco once again headed for the falsetto range as he sang, “Still my heart sings,” before more Brahms — A Young Girl’s Song.

The finale was Weill’s The Saga of Jenny (“Poor Jenny”), with words by Ira Gershwin, before Peelman and Greco took a bow and returned for an encore from another German émigré composer, Eric Korngold – the best-wishes song Glückwunsch.

This was a concert dedicated to sheer pleasure, with Peelman sometimes hunched intensely over the keys and elsewhere adopting a lighter touch. Greco, apart from his beautiful voice, proved master of characterisation as he played the girl, the boy and the arch narrator in turn.