Champions of Welsh music past and present, the Cardiff-based Tŷ Cerdd label gives us a survey of 20th- and 21st-century songs in ‘Taliesin’s Songbook’, which takes its name from the sixth-century poet whose work is widely regarded as marking the first flowering of cultural activity in Wales. Thoughtfully programmed by pianist Andrew Matthews-Owen, it’s an attractive album that explores a strong, innovative tradition of song composition to texts in both Welsh and English, ‘deserving of an audience well beyond the Severn Bridge’, as Matthews-Owen puts it in his booklet note. And he is indeed right.

There are wonderful things here, ranging from Alun Hoddinott’s folk song to grand declarations of love from Arwel Hughes’s opera Menna. Dilys Elwyn-Edwards’s bittersweet song-cycle Caneuon Natur (‘Songs of Nature’), contemplating transience in the natural changes in the Welsh landscape, contrasts with the sparser, altogether more urbane approach of Mark Bowden’s 2008 cycle The Soul Candle, to an unsettling text by Gwyneth Lewis. ET Davies’s Ynys y Plant (‘The Children’s Isle’) starts out as a sentimental ballad before its tone and implications suddenly darken in the final stanza, while Rhian Samuel’s unaccompanied ‘Yr Alarch’ (‘The Swan’) is something of a virtuoso showpiece, slightly at a tangent from the rest of the disc. The real high points, though, are the songs by Morfydd Owen, who died tragically young in 1918: ‘Gweddi y Pechadur’ (‘The Sinner’s Prayer’), with its hovering vocal line over slow chordal progressions, is particularly remarkable in its fervour and beauty.

Matthews-Owen proves a fine guide through this repertory, playing with admirable clarity and focus across a wide stylistic range. Six well-known Welsh singers, meanwhile, divide the songs between them. There are a few moments of unevenness. Rebecca Evans seems more at ease with Hoddinott’s folk songs than with Elwyn-Edwards’s cycle, where the words sometimes slip and she only strikes form in the ravishing final song, ‘Nos o Haf’ (‘Summer Night’). The close recording, meanwhile, catches an occasionally uncomfortable edge in Susan Bullock’s tone: even so, there’s no mistaking the intensity of the Menna arias, though she’s ultimately at her best in her brother Dafydd’s declamatory ‘Crib Goch’, a marvellous evocation of Snowdonia, where the power in the voice thrills and the text really hits home.

‘Yr Alarch’ forms a fine display piece for Elin Manahan Thomas, though it’s her exquisite way with the reined-in beauty of Grace Williams’s ‘The Loom’ that most impresses here. Elgan Llŷr Thomas sounds lyrical, handsome and impulsive in William Mathias’s ‘Pan Oeddwn Fachgen’ (‘A Dream of Youth’), while Gareth Brynmor John’s telling way with words, very reminiscent of Peter Pears, is heard to advantage in The Soul Candle and Hoddinott’s lovely ‘Medieval Carol’. Natalya Romaniw, meanwhile, is simply glorious in the Morfydd Owen songs – it’s impossible to imagine them better done – before rounding the album off with Merion Williams’s raptly contemplative ‘Gwynfyd’ (‘Paradise’). You need to download English translations from Tŷ Cerdd’s website, which is a bit of a drawback: parallel Welsh-English texts in the booklet would have been preferable here. But this is a fine disc that opens ears and minds to much that is quite genuinely fascinating. Do listen to it.