Music / Art Song Canberra: A Brief History of the Unrequited. Wesley Music Centre, May 24. Reviewed by HELEN MUSA.

The enticing title for this recital by baritone Alasdair Stretch, pays homage to the adage that our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thoughts.

Stretch is part of a move to extend the concept of art song, and used his perfectly modulated baritone voice to explore the potential of the register as he ventured from the Renaissance well into the 21st century.

Beginning with a melancholy love song by no less a person than Henry VIII, Stretch opened with two works by Elizabethan-era master of musical grief John Dowland, the latter interspersed with a cheeky but beautifully articulated rendition of Thomas Ravencroft’s nonsense song, Martin Said to His Man.

Shakespeare got a look-in in the form of Thomas Morley’s Oh Mistress Mine in a modern arrangement by 20th-century composer Gerald Finzi, which provided a nice variety of tone for pianist Zac Hamilton-Russell.

After a haunting song by Ralph Vaughan Williams musing on words by the poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Stretch turned to another Shakespearean ditty, It Was a Lover and His Lass, tossing off the “hey ding-a-ding dings” with sprightly alacrity.

After interval it was time for a leap into the 21st century with a prize-winning composition by Australian composer Calvin Bowman, Now Touch the Air Softly, a simple expression of place and beauty, before a completely unexpected flashback to Gilbert and Sullivan’s I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General, allowing the pianist to join in and Stretch to insert contemporary references to KPIs, colleagues in the Luminescence Chamber Singers — of which Stretch is part — and even Canberra’s music critics.

By now it was clear that Stretch’s focus was not classical music only as he launched, with a more relaxed singing style, into Glitter in the Air by pop singer Pink (Alecia Moore) and Billy Mann, before, as Hamilton-Russell delicately picked the keyboard, Stretch quietly asked the question, “How can we dance when our earth is turning?” in a slow take on the famous Midnight Oils song, Beds Are Burning.

Young love and the reluctance to look ahead to the future is the subject of the pop song To the Stars by Rachel Mink, Stretch’s colleague in Luminescence, who was in the audience. “Don’t let them change us,” she wrote when she was just 15.

Satirical comedy followed with Randy Newman’s provocative song about short people, although Stretch undercut the controversial lyrics with the words, “All men are brothers until the day they die,” before a seamless transition into the famous song What a Wonderful World.

Stretch’s final number was prefaced with an apology to his mum for what was to follow.

That turned out to be Inflatable You, Tim Minchin’s charmingly wicked ode to a blow-up sex doll, full of unprintable lyrics, and after Stretch joined Hamilton-Russell at the keyboard, concluding with the threat/promise, “I won’t let you down.”

The founding fathers of Wesley Music Centre might well have been turning in their graves.