RECORDINGS

From the great white Canadian north comes this warm, fetching set of songs, traversing the serio-comic region where cabaret and art song meet. Soprano Patricia O’Callaghan brings an easy grace to works by Satie, Poulenc, and Kurt Weill--who provides the album’s existential shrug of a title track. She brings special understanding and luminosity to the four tart and quirky Satie compositions that open the album, to Poulenc’s rueful “Lune d’Avril,” and to the alternately pointed and saucy demands of singing Weill. She is joined by Canadian pianist Jenny Crober, whose understated accompaniment is simpatico with the aim of the project: a celebration of songs from different, but not unrelated, traditions, delicately balanced between the worlds of art music and musical cocktails. O’Callaghan possesses a controlled voice, but not so much that she can’t invest a pinch of worldly abandon in the closer, “One Life to Live,” with its hedonistic rationale, “It is my thesis, why go to pieces, step out while you’re in your prime.”

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Albums are rated on a scale of one star (poor) to four (excellent).