Author Jones recounts that Brönner was passing by the A-Trane jazz club in Berlin after a radio engagement in 2001 and saw that Murphy was performing.

Brönner told James Gavin that Murphy "was absolutely brilliant, showing the trio what he wanted onstage by almost 'conducting' with his voice...I started crying because it touched me so much".

Jones writes, "His insight was that Murphy possessed the rare ability to tap into profound, half-buried emotional conflicts, in a way that made his ballad performances extremely moving".

[1] Brönner said, "For me, only Frank Sinatra has the same ability to make me feel he is speaking to me when he sings...The songs that Mark sounded so good on were the ones that contained a big unresolved emotion.

"[3] Author Will Friedwald points out that Once to Every Heart was Murphy's first release for a major label since Song For the Geese eight years earlier and his first album of standards and ballads in nearly two decades.

In the review Thom Jurek writes, "Mark Murphy has, for decades, given listeners breathtaking performances that underscore the very heart of song itself."

Jurek says, "Ultimately, this is Murphy's finest recording in over a decade, and should be embraced by anyone with a remote interest in great singers, and by those who are deeply attached to ballads or torch tomes.

He singles out the track 2 and 3 medleys for praise, and Duke Ellington's "Do Nothin' Till You Hear from Me" as "one of the finest, most unsentimental and burningly sensual versions of the song ever recorded".

[7] The Penguin Guide to Jazz assigns 3 stars (meaning a good if middleweight set; one that lacks the stature or consistency of the finest records, but which is certainly rewarding on its own terms) and the review says, "The Verve album looks like a slightly strange one-off.

The setting is the kind of lush, rhapsodic mood which Brönner's records have customarily been involved with, and Murphy certainly sounds like he's enjoying the upholstery.

Jones finds an "unusual degree of rapport between Murphy and Brönner, helped in no small measure by the 70-year-old's road-roughened gravel in combination with the trumpet's high, breathy Baker-like notes.

Jones highlights the title track, "Our Game", "Bein' Green", and the "medley of "Skylark", a tune of romantic longing, and "You Don't Know What Love Is", one of anguished loss" which "really twists" "the emotional knife".

Friedwald heard Murphy explain during a live performance that the song was written "in the immediate after math of 9/11 and that it described two people encountering each other again in this frightening new world".

[4] In his book, A Biographical Guide to the Great Jazz and Pop Singers, Friedwald writes, "There is no one better at taking a familiar or even unfamiliar old song and turning it inside out, spilling its guts and finding the feeling underneath.

[4] Author Andrew Rowan acknowledges Murphy as one of the best interpreters of the Great American Songbook and finds him at his top in this release of ballads only, praising his rhythmic sense, intonation, melodic improvisation, emotional expressiveness, and story telling ability.

[12] The Jazzwise (UK) October 2005 review said, "A triumphant reminder of the enduring brilliance of a vocalist whose name should be mentioned in the same breath as the Sinatras, Hendricks and Beys of this world.

"[1] The JazzTimes December 2005 review said, "Born out of Murphy's understandable admiration for eerily Chet Baker-esque German trumpeter Till Bronner...In a year crowded with laudable releases, the single finest jazz-vocal album of 2005".

[13] Scott Yanow includes the album in his list of "other worthy recordings of the last twenty years" by Mark Murphy in his book The Jazz Singers: The Ultimate Guide.

[14] Yanow also reviewed the album in Jazziz in 2006 singling out "Once to Every Heart", "I'm Through With Love", and the "Skylark" medley, praising Murphy's subtle improvisations, attention to the lyrics.

In person he tends toward wild, boppish deconstructions of jazz standards, but most of his devotees favor his ballads, in which the most idyllic sentiments can sound painfully raw.