Alison Truefitt (1942-2020) was touched by genius. During a life sadly curtailed by dementia she managed to cram in five different careers, in all of which she operated at the highest level. As a young woman leaving University, she became Education Correspondent at the London Evening Standard. This she abandoned in 1971 to found the White Lion Street Free School in London, which broke the mould of traditional education and influenced generations of theorists. Then she moved on to pursue a lifelong dream of being a professional musician, enrolling in her thirties at the royal Academy of Music and emerging a world-class singer, as you will hear on this album. And, entering her fifties, she combined two further parallel careers, saving the community shop in her local village in Wales (for which she was awarded an MBE) and fulfilling her potential as a writer of poems, stories and novels.

The song cycles offered here show Truefitt at various stages of her singing life. The Gurney was recorded in 1981: here is a young voice, fresh and ingenue. The Dodgson cycle shows her at the height of her vocal powers, the instrument mature and golden. The Smart Songs - poems about the vagaries of being an old woman and a woman poet - were recorded when she was 70, tailored to Truefitt's persona and to her voice as it was at that time, still wonderful with an undiminished interpretational genius.