Kathryn Roberts and Sean Lakeman
Cecil Sharp House, London/Touring

OUT and about to promote their must-hear new album Personae, Kathryn Roberts and Sean Lakeman win the audience over as much with their candour as the engrossing music they offer up.

Theirs is an intimate set, allowing close-up appreciation of Roberts’s extraordinary vocal range and interpretative skill and Lakeman’s startling guitar mastery.

We're all captivated by the tragic melancholy of 52 Hertz, a song about a Pacific Ocean whale who mysteriously transmitted his calls on a frequency inaudible to other whales — who use a different wavelength — and consequently became the loneliest whale on Earth. Marine biologists believe he was born deaf.

The gruesome moral ballad Tribute of Hands is an intriguing, if bloody, legend of the founding of Antwerp, while nature returns on Old, Old, Old, the philosophical musings of giant tortoise Jonathan. Born in 1832 in the Seychelles, he presently lives on the island of St Helena — Napoleon’s final residence — and is believed to be the world’s oldest living land animal.

There's a traditional gallows ballad The Robber Bridegroom followed by a “smutty” one, The Lusty Smith, and then the strangely enticing yet sinister story of Slavonic river mermaid Russalka — immortalised in Antonin Dvorak’s and Alexander Dargomyzhky’s operas — which are all enthusiastically received.

But it is on Seasons that Roberts’s cultured vocals and Lakeman's guitar virtuosity become sublimely intertwined to mesmerising effect.

Music for all ears and all seasons. Miss not, they tour until mid-May

Tour details: kathrynrobertsandseanlakeman.com/gigs