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Intended for listeners with a strong focus on and love of Ireland and its folk and fantasy tales, as well as its turbulent history, and including an unusual mixture of music with spoken-word-only sections, a new Métier CD called Ghost Songs is also performed with considerable skill and sensitivity. The Laetare Vocal Ensemble, a 36-voice Dublin-based chamber choir, has no problem whatsoever with the genre-mixing elements that are pervasive here, as in so many CDs with a contemporary focus.

The disc offers a generous helping (80 minutes) of musical settings, poems, play excerpts and more – some sung by the choir, some read by the authors themselves (Marina Carr, Paula Meehan, Dairena Ní Chinnéide), some read in a suitably cultivated voice by a radio presenter (Carl Corcoran, who reads poetry by W.B. Yeats – by far the best-known contributor of words here – and Lola Ridge). This CD has no obvious reason for its particular sequence: it is not chronological; material is not grouped in any discernible way; and there is no particular thematic unity beyond that generated by the Ghost Songs title and its straightforward, if not very informative, subtitle: “Contemporary Music and Words from Ireland.”

There are in fact a couple of tracks here, the last two, called The Ghost Song, and there are other pairs with a similar focus, such as The Graves at Arbour Hill. In both these cases, Paula Meehan, who wrote the words, first delivers them; then there is a musical setting incorporating them. This is an approach taken elsewhere on the disc as well – for instance, with Yeats’ Down by the Salley Gardens. In all three of those cases, the musical settings are by Seán Doherty, who is quite sensitive to the verbiage and does a good job of setting the material for the vocal ensemble. Other composers heard here, including Síle Denvir, Rhona Clarke, and Michael Holohan, also appear to be steeped in Irish tale-telling traditions and accomplished at setting words appropriately.

There is a wealth of material here – 35 tracks of it – but much of it is quite brief, a minute or less, and nothing lasts as much as seven minutes: there is one six-and-a-half-minute piece and one five-and-a-half-minute one, but the preponderance of material is in the minute-and-a-half range, making its points or doing its scene-painting (verbal or musical) in miniature and then giving way to something new and, most of the time, equally brief. This disc is an immersive experience in elements of contemporary Irish music and mostly contemporary Irish poetry and tale-telling, its sincerity and authenticity beyond reproach but its target audience a very narrowly defined and highly focused one.