Marmite music is how Booth and Glynn describe the work of Australian composer Percy Grainger — people tend to love it or hate it. Grainger was eccentric in any number of ways, musical and non-musical.
Booth sings his folksong arrangements, which include material he collected himself, with an appealing girlish freshness. The performances — which include piano solo and duet arrangements — do smooth out some of the corners that others like to accentuate in Grainger’s writing.
The effect is to tone down idiosyncrasies which hard-core fans cherish. But it is interesting to hear the music so plausibly presented as more mainstream than quirky.
