Globalisation has perhaps liberated some music from a national straight jacket: until recently Dame Janet Baker’s recording of Elgar’s Sea Pictures cast a seemingly endless shadow but Latvian mezzo-soprano Elīna Garanča and the illustrious Berlin Statskapelle under Daniel Barenboim gives a convincing and impressively idiomatic account, considering that little of the poetry is top notch and the scansion would prove awkward for a Non-English speaker.

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Her diction isn’t quite the equal of Dame Janet’s in all these songs, especially the “bigger” Sabbath Morning at Sea and The Swimmer, but she makes more than decent fist of most of the music. She is best in the quiet first piece, Sea Slumber Song, both a lullaby and nocturne which, in the hands of these artists, conveys here deep power and splendid...