The American composer Juliana Hall has devoted herself to the art song for nearly three decades. Her sensitivity to words is on impressive display on ‘Love’s Signature’, which features settings of texts by Shakespeare, letters by Emily Dickinson and poems by Marianne Moore. In their first recordings, these songs show Hall to be a composer who savours lyrical lines and harmonies peppered with gentle spices.

The most recent collection, O Mistress Mine (2016), comprises a dozen songs set to famous passages from Shakespeare plays. Hall uses musical gestures to heighten the meaning of the words. She is especially effective in a luminous take on ‘Who is Silvia?’ and a warm account of ‘Lawn as white as driven snow’. The cycle receives fresh performances by countertenor Darryl Taylor and the composer as pianist.

Hall rises to an entirely different set of challenges setting seven Dickinson songs to music in Syllables of Velvet, Sentences of Plush (1989), the title derived from a missive to a cousin. Dickinson’s words come across with crystalline clarity in Hall’s tender incarnations, which capture both the genial and witty sides of this most versatile of American poets. The five songs in Propriety (1992) focus on the classical music world. Moore pays tribute to various aspects of the art, even celebrating the survival of a stellar venue to rousing and fanciful effect in ‘Carnegie Hall: Rescued’. Soprano Susan Narucki and pianist Donald Berman illuminate the varied pleasures in the Dickinson and Moore cycles.