Despite the best efforts of a brave few, countertenors still tend to be pigeonholed as recitalists. Alongside David Daniels, Bejun Mehta has been one of the most active in exploring the mainstream song repertoire and his programme here offers a well-planned survey of the English musical landscape of Howells, Quilter, Finzi and Vaughan Williams that is usually the province of other voice types. Any suspicion that these songs might sound lukewarm or tentative in the hands of a countertenor is soon dispelled by Mehta’s invigorating singing of Quilter’s ‘Blow, blow, thou winter wind’ and the keen way he dramatises Stanford’s ‘La Belle Dame sans merci’. The verbal point he brings to a handful of Purcell songs in arrangements by Britten and Tippett is also appreciated.

By contrast, the more languid and sensitive songs in which one expects a countertenor to excel – Finzi’s ‘The Sigh’ or ‘Since we loved’, for example, both warmly accompanied by Julius Drake – bring to the fore an underlying problem. At just the point where beauty is most called for, the voice is apt to sound hard and edgy, especially at the top, taking the shine off otherwise perceptive performances. There are only a couple of songs where Mehta and Daniels overlap on CD – Vaughan Williams’s ‘Linden Lea’ and Purcell’s ‘Music for a While’ – and in both it is Daniels who is the more vocally seductive despite singing in higher keys. As an example of what a countertenor can achieve in the standard recital repertoire, his disc ‘Serenade’ (Virgin, 5/00) would be a better place to start.