Complete editions for all. The day is not so far off, and, among eligible minor composers, Quilter has two assets in addition to his intrinsic merit: his output is relatively small and most of it can be performed by the same two musicians. This is Vol 1 but with two CDs it must constitute a major part of the whole enterprise. I am writing without benefit of a booklet, but so far as I can see, both programmes are broadly chronological, the first with settings of Shakespeare as its chief coordinate, the second focusing on Shelley.

I wish I could believe that more thought, or more of a maturing process, had gone into the performances. What (to me) it sounds like is two accomplished professionals “going through” the songs. Stephen Barlow plays admirably, and he may have worked them into his system over years of practice. So may Mark Stone but (again to my ears) it doesn’t sound like it. On the second CD he does seem sometimes to find something that touches the imagination, as in the Six Songs, Op 23. But otherwise I get no feeling of his having made the songs his own. The singing is clear, with good diction, and his high tenor‑y baritone makes the most of the effectively placed high notes. He also phrases with notable breadth. But he does not appear to have yet that essential art of the singer of songs – to make things live, as though they are happening in the singer’s mind, here and now.

The great value of a complete edition, however, is for reference and for “browsing”. This time, for instance, I “discovered” on the first CD the Three Pastoral Songs and on the second the Two September Songs; also a renewed conviction that the gem of the whole collection is the Seven Elizabethan Lyrics, each song a beauty and of a kind quite personal to its composer.