Sonnets from Petrarch and Shakespeare to Auden afford a wide scope of musical settings. Ben Johnson’s selection, which had its beginnings in his programme for the 2013 Cardiff Singer of the World song prize, brings together ten 19th- and 20th-century composers and a range of languages and styles.

Its rewards lie in the juxtaposition of the familiar and the rare, and comparing the ways composers deal with the awkwardly long lines of the sonnet form. Schubert’s two settings of Petrarch – ‘Apollo, lebet noch’, D628, and ‘Nunmehr, da Himmel’, D630 – are typically fluid, varying phrase lengths with complete naturalness. Johnson’s enthusiasm for the sonnet settings of Parry is well borne out by the emotional journey the composer takes through Shakespeare’s complex Sonnet 71, ‘No longer mourn for me’, with its undertow of self-loathing. A pair of settings of Shakespeare’s ‘When most I wink’ by David Bowerman and Sauguet, the latter in French, are nicely differentiated from each other (and from Britten’s darker vision in his Nocturne). Most effective of all is Vaughan Williams’s much-loved ‘Silent Noon’, rapt and eloquent.

Through all of these Johnson and his namesake, accompanist Graham Johnson, are vivid guides. Johnson (the singer) is not quite in equally good voice throughout, possessing melting head tones but also a sometimes forceful edge. Both are in evidence in the pair of Italian-language song-cycles that form the backbone of the disc, Liszt’s Three Petrarch Sonnets and Britten’s Seven Sonnets of Michelangelo. Each of the Liszt songs starts out sounding stressed but resolves in a spirit of tenderness, and the most extreme vocal challenges (try the optional high B near the end of ‘Benedetto sia ’l giorno’) are skilfully handled. In the Britten cycle the young Pears sounds fresher, Rolfe Johnson more limpidly plangent, but this vital performance is alert to the potential of words and music alike. Nearly 80 minutes spent with some of the world’s greatest poetry can hardly fail to be a pleasure.