You might count Ivor Gurney as the “lost British composer”. Tragically, he died in 1937 having spent most of the inter-war years in an asylum. Already in 1913 he had shown signs of bipolar instability, but Stanford considered Gurney the pupil of his who most clearly displayed the signs of “genius”, no small claim when you remember how many fine composers Stanford taught. Certainly, this collection of 30 songs, the latest in the Naxos English Song series, demonstrates that genius, above all in his feeling for English words, which is also demonstrated in his own poetry.

The writer of the excellent notes on this disc suggests very perceptively that Gurney’s feeling for triplet hemiolas in his settings may owe something to his training as a chorister in Gloucester Cathedral, or even to his love of Brahms. Sadly, too few of these songs are well known. The one most familiar to me is “I will go with my father a-ploughing”, folk-like and exuberant, which Dame Janet Baker included in one of her very first recordings.

Otherwise the settings of John Masefield are especially memorable, notably “By a Bierside” with a wonderful final climax, superbly conveyed here by Susan Bickley. Another poet close to Gurney was Edward Thomas, best-known for the glorious poem “Adlestrop” and here represented by some of the most touching of the songs. It is interesting too that Gurney sets “The Bonnie Earl of Murray” with a real Scottish tang, a song, incidentally, that Brahms set earlier.

Wherever you turn, these songs offer illumination and refreshment, splendidly captured not only by Susan Bickley but by her ever-sensitive accompanist, Iain Burnside.