Roderick Williams teams up with the admirable Coull Quartet for an uncommonly fine account of Samuel Barber’s Dover Beach, which, in its sensitivity to nuance, expressive charge and poetic instinct, easily withstands comparison with Julien Van Mellaerts’s with the Navarra Quartet in the recent anthology devoted to the composer’s complete published songs (Resonus, 7/22). On this occasion, however, the 20-year-old’s sublime setting appears in the context of a whole programme of music for voice and string quartet, to which the versatile Williams has contributed his own shapely adaptations of two of Barber’s finest songs, ‘Sleep now’ (after James Joyce, from his Op 10 set, published in 1937) and the raptly ecstatic ‘Sure on this shining night’ (to a poem by James Agee, the third of his Op 13 songs from 1939). He also freshly delivers – and, once again, offers new arrangements of – the first two of Delius’s Seven Songs from the Norwegian (the decidedly Griegian ‘Twilight Fancies’ and carefree ‘Young Venevil’) and wistful ‘I-Brasil’ (to a text by Fiona Macleod, aka William Sharp).

Annotator Robert Matthew-Walker reminds us that it was Peter Warlock who introduced Delius to Macleod’s poem, and proceedings are launched by 11 settings by Warlock, most of which he reworked from voice-and-piano originals. There are gems galore in this delightful sequence, for which Williams is joined by soprano Sophie Bevan and tenor James Gilchrist. Two offerings from 1927 stand out: to a poem by Thomas Lovell Beddoes (1803-49) and dedicated to Arnold Bax, ‘Sorrow’s Lullaby’ enshrines a languorous, harmonically probing dialogue between soprano and baritone; and the gorgeous ‘Corpus Christi’ carol, which Warlock himself thought one of his very best things, is heard in an arrangement for soprano and tenor. The marvellous ‘Sleep’ is here, too, its instrumental garb evoking a consort of viols. Last but not least there’s Sally Beamish’s Tree Carols (2014). Commissioned by the University of Warwick for the Coull Quartet and tailored specifically for Williams’s baritone voice, it comprises a keenly responsive and acutely imaginative treatment of five ‘tree poems’ by Fiona Sampson, the idiom at once communicative and approachable. Suffice to say, Williams sings with consummate agility, intelligence and disarming beauty of timbre, and his partnership with the Coull Quartet is a most nourishing one.

A strongly appealing release, this, and I have no grumbles whatsoever with Somm’s production and presentation.