Natalie Merchant, The Sage Gateshead

Merchant's new album Leave Your Sleep is the culmination of a seven-year project in which she casts 19th and 20th Century British and American poetry to music.

She explains they are poems by, about or for children as she sought to harness the lessons learned, harsh and wonderful, in an ongoing "conversation" with her young daughter.

It is, she says scarily, a concept album, but it's one of those rare works of music (or literature) that works for both adults and children alike.

That said, I hadn't quite grasped the scale of ambition of this show.

The former 10,000 Maniacs leader explains that after "collaborating with these people who were primarily dead", she wanted to know more about them.

And so, a big screen projects the black and white portraits she's hauled from libraries and, with a dash of fascinating biography gleaned from extensive research into the men and woman behind the words, she brings us part-university lecture, part-musical séance, evoking ghosts whose poetry now dances across beautiful, deft, inventive music.

The journey includes both obscure and renowned, through Laurence Alma-Tadema, to Robert Louis Stevenson's The Land of Nod, and on to Charles Edward Carryl - the "US answer to Lewis Carroll" - whose verse depicts a 372-year-old giant who has given up eating little boys, now preferring an eel and some kip.

Her tales of these writers' lives are engrossing - this "gentlemen, businessman and master of nonsense" was a stockbroker who wrote for kids.

But without music of this quality, the show might lurch into tedium. Here, the cello echoes The Sleepy Giant's lolloping, lumbering and innocent slumber in a delicate waltz. Later, Edward Lear's Calico Pie is a country and western knees up. There's honky-tonk, more folk, some blues, bluegrass, even a bit of surf.

The likes of Christina Rossetti, Mervyn Peake, Gerard Manley Hopkins and EE Cummings sing along. Charles Causley is the poet she turns to when her little girl started asking her the difficult questions, namely: "Momma, why is there war?"

Deciding to discuss not just the "wonder and joys, but the disappointments and horror" of life, she turns to his Nursery Rhyme of Innocence and Experience, now a haunting folk song.

To Robert Graves she stands and stares up to the picture she's just conjured, the poet as her muse, or at times like she's looking up to her father.

This was a show for people who love words, a singer with a wonderful voice and a concept fully realised. It evoked something old and beautiful.