A stimulating release, this, particularly valuable for its focus on the neglected song output of one of Vaughan Williams’s most gifted pupils. Elizabeth Maconchy (1907 94) first came into the elder composer’s orbit in 1923, when she enrolled as a student at the Royal College of Music, and remembered him with fondness. Of the seven songs recorded here, the earliest is ‘Impetuous heart, be still’, a setting of a text from WB Yeats’s first play, The Countess Cathleen. Five years separate it from a treatment (dated February 11, 1929) of another, altogether more famous Yeats verse, ‘The Cloths of Heaven’, the idiom now markedly more progressive (that autumn, she travelled to Prague to study under Karel Jirák). Translated by her classicist husband William LeFanu (1904 95) from the Anacreontea (an anthology of 62 poems discovered in a 10th-century manuscript in the style of the Greek lyric poet Anacreon), both ‘Love stood at my door’ and ‘The Bee-Sting’ were originally intended for a 1938 collection entitled The Garland: Variations on a Theme but have remained in manuscript. The first possesses an almost operatic scope that finds fullest expression some 33 years later in ‘Faustus’, a gripping and uncompromising ‘dramatic scena for tenor and piano’ to lines from Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus (c1588 92).

Tenor James Geer and pianist Ronald Woodley prove splendidly alert and sympathetic exponents of all this material and are just as successful in their deft advocacy of the two masterworks by Vaughan Williams. The early Songs of Travel (1901 04) come up with delectable freshness, Geer’s ingratiatingly mellifluous timbre exhibiting a disarming grace and scrupulous sensitivity to the text that are matched by Woodley’s watchful pianism. Interpretative insights abound, not least in ‘Let beauty awake’ and ‘The Roadside Fire’, and that frisson of enchantment that comes with the respective lines ‘And the stars are bright in the west!’ and ‘Where white flows the river and bright blows the broom’; the cherishable ‘Whither must I wander?’, too, never fails to warm the cockles. Entirely different again is the rarefied world inhabited by the Four Poems by Fredegond Shove (published in 1925). ‘The Water Mill’ is an especially intoxicating, conspicuously Schubertian creation, but it’s the opening ‘Motion and Stillness’ and remarkable ‘The New Ghost’ that show RVW at his most intrepidly imaginative.

Ronald Woodley contributes a most helpful essay in the accompanying booklet (which also includes full texts). Admirable production and sound, too, courtesy of Andrew Hallifax. So, if you fancy the idea, don’t hesitate – and the good news is that we can expect a second volume to appear later this year.