Charles Villiers Stanford felt a special affinity for the orchestral song, an idiom which began to establish itself as a distinct art form in it's own right at the end of the nineteenth century with composers such as Mahler, Richard Strauss, Elgar and Bantock. This recording, released to mark the composer's centenary year, features a wide selection of colourful and inventive orchestrations he made of his own songs and arrangements of Irish folk melodies for the concert hall, many of which were made for the leading soloists of the days such as Harry Plunket Greene, David Bispham, Marie Brema and Olga Michailoff (the wife of Henry Wood).