IT WAS a pleasure to be both entertained and informed by Louise Jordan in her new anthology performance. Her songs mainly celebrate women – many from Wessex – who asserted their individual gifts, and despite the daunting challenges in contravening social conventions and male hostility, succeeded in their achievements. From the eighteenth century smuggler Lovey Warne of the New Forest, to World War One’s female munitions workers and Dr Elsie Inglis, the enterprising Scottish doctor and suffragist, Louise interspersed her own and others’ folk songs with tales of these women’s lives, and insights into her research and workshops.

The emotional range of her material and performance was richly varied as she moved from humour to passion and to pathos. In immersing herself in folk song tradition she has refreshed it with her distinctive voice. She is accomplished as her own accompanist on keyboard or guitar, and also unaccompanied, as in the last song before the interval. To the music of Sing a Song of Sixpence the alternative words set by Nina Macdonald commemorated the suffering soldiers of the Great War. This was matched by the last song of all which was a very moving tribute in the setting of Cicely Fox Smith’s poem Homeward. Louise fully realised the poignancy of the soldier in Flanders yearning for the return at the end of the day with the working horses – but in the fields of his native Hampshire, not those of savage warfare.

As her audience gradually joined Louise in the haunting chorus, we could appreciate the fine mixture of feminism and femininity in the programme and the performance.

Review by John Cox