Soprano Elizabeth Llewellyn’s debut recital album consolidates the favourable impression she made on Martyn Brabbins’s superb Hyperion recordings of Vaughan Williams’s A Sea Symphony (10/18) and Elgar’s Caractacus (4/19). This time, she and her exemplary accompanist, Simon Lepper, lavish their considerable skills on the extensive song output of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912).

Bearing a dedication to the composer’s wife, the 1904 collection entitled Six Sorrow Songs comprises settings of poetry by Christina Rossetti; it’s a finely crafted sequence, the climactic ‘Too late for love!’ conveying a plangent intensity which is matched here by the haunting ‘A Lament’ (a later treatment of the same poet’s ‘A Dirge’, also set by John Ireland in his 1918 songbook Mother and Child).

For his Op 17 African Romances Coleridge-Taylor chose seven poems by the African American poet and novelist Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906); the two had met in 1896 and this was the first of their joint enterprises. Charming as these offerings are, however, they are arguably eclipsed by both the wholly enchanting ‘Big Lady Moon’ – No 3 of the Five Fairy Ballads (1909), which set poems for children by the Sierra Leonean Kathleen Mary Easmon (1891-1924) – and the memorable ballad ‘A king there lived in Thule’, written in 1908 for the precocious Sydney-born Marie Lohr (1890-1975), who was then appearing on the West End stage in the role of Marguerite in an adaptation of Goethe’s Faust.

We’re also treated to three items each from the Op 12 Southern Love Songs (‘Minguillo’ is especially fetching) and Songs of Sun and Shade (‘incredibly intimate and sensual’, as Llewellyn astutely observes in the booklet), as well as two of the Six Songs, Op 37 (‘Canoe Song’ and ‘You’ll love me yet’, the latter after Robert Browning). First published two years after Coleridge-Taylor’s cruelly early death, ‘Life and Death’ – to words by Jessie Adelaide Middleton (1864-1933), known to connoisseurs of supernatural fiction for her Ghost Book Trilogy – brings proceedings to an arresting close.

An irresistible anthology, in sum, and there’s lots more by this remarkable figure for Llewellyn and Lepper to explore should the opportunity arise. Excellent sound and presentation, too.