“The world needs beauty,and there is plenty of it to be found in this collection of art songs by American composer Garth Baxter. Baxter seems to have carved out a happy if quiet career as a composer in an array of genres, with art song at the forefront. He bills himself as a modern traditionalist, and the music heard here bears out that description. His songs are suffused with lyric romanticism within a framework of familiar tonality, but plenty of modernistic touches in both his melodic and harmonic palettes keep everything fresh. Baxter knows how to shape lovely melodic lines and to cushion them within a warm harmonic framework.”