Beth Taylor's voice announces itself in the first few seconds of My Lagan Love and doesn't let go. Hamilton Harty's arrangement of the Irish folk song is the opening track, and it's a smart choice — it positions Taylor not as a Handel specialist (the reputation that preceded her into this studio) but as a storyteller first, a singer second. The Lagan flows through it, and so does she. The programme's conceit — songs of the sea, water, depth — could easily feel gimmicky, a themed compilation rather than a coherent recital. It doesn't. Taylor and pianist Hamish Brown have curated upward, ending with Elgar's Sea Pictures rather than hiding it in the middle. By the time you reach it, you've been prepared by Schubert's Meeres Stille, by Ethel Smyth's Three Moods of the Sea, by Harty's Sea Wrack — a sequence of increasingly complex emotional weather that the Elgar crowns rather than interrupts. What makes Taylor's instrument unusual is the combination: true contralto breadth at the bottom, mezzo extension at the top, and a legato that stitches those registers together without a seam. Most singers in this range have a join you can hear. Taylor doesn't. Her Schubert benefits enormously from this — Meeres Stille in particular, where the stillness of the text requires absolute smoothness of line. She delivers it. The rarities are the real find. Hedwige Chrétien — a Paris Conservatoire professor, essentially forgotten — gets two songs here, and Taylor's gleaming upper register turns them into miniature aquarelles, light catching water. Cameron Biles-Liddell's The Breakers, written specifically for Taylor, is luminous and earns its place. Ethel Smyth's Three Moods of the Sea is the most significant discovery: reflective, structurally interesting, and deserving wider programming. Brown is not merely accompanying throughout — he is thinking, finding depths in short songs that less imaginative pianists would leave flat. The Elgar is the summit and it holds. Brown's embellished piano accompaniments (the originals are orchestral) don't feel like reductions — they feel like choices. Taylor's In Haven has genuine lilt; The Swimmer is attacked with the tempest the text demands. These are considered readings, not reverential ones, and they stand alongside Janet Baker's and Sarah Connolly's classic accounts without embarrassment. That is not a small thing to say.
