‘It’s hard not to reminisce at this stage of my life and career, now that I have been singing, one way or another, for the best part of 50 years’, Felicity Palmer writes in a booklet-note for ‘Two Little Words’, her first recital disc for some time. It was recorded at Snape Maltings two years ago, during an Aldeburgh Music residency she shared with her accompanist Simon Lepper, whose influence she acknowledges on her decision to return to Lieder after a long career on the operatic stage. It’s a wonderfully intimate disc that communicates the tangible enjoyment that she and Lepper find in performing together. It also forms a personal, reflective summary of a life lived with, and through, music.

The programme consists of ‘pieces that hold particular memories’, as she puts it. She opens with Michael Head’s ‘Foxgloves’, ‘a very early art song I learnt as a student at the Guildhall School of Music’. She includes music by her father, Marshall Palmer – an arrangement of the German folk song ‘Das zerbrochene Ringlein’ and an exquisite setting of Shelley’s ‘Music when soft voices die’, which deserves to be better known. Britten’s French folk-song arrangements are an oblique reminder that it was her albums of French song, recorded for Argo in the 1970s, that, for many, marked her out as an artist to be reckoned with. The singing actress is very much present, too, both in Joseph Horovitz’s scena ‘Lady Macbeth’ and in a group of cabaret and show songs towards the disc’s close.

Time has inevitably taken its toll on Palmer’s voice, though her way with her material is, as one might expect, penetratingly insightful. Carrie Jacobs-Bond’s ‘When you come to the end of a perfect day’ expresses nostalgia but no trace of sentimentality, while Brahms’s ‘Da unten im Thale’ is an object lesson in how to convey the most complex emotions by the simplest means. ‘Schubert has daunted me, in terms of singing and performing it adequately’, she states, yet the Rosamunde song is beautiful, in both its control and its melancholy.

The character portraits, meanwhile, are all unsparingly vivid. Horovitz’s scena is uncompromisingly done, the text formidably projected: ‘Banquo’s buried: he cannot come out on’s grave’ really freezes your marrow. Madeleine Dring’s nightclub proprietress looks back at faded glamour of with scathing irony and terror, while John Pritchett’s ‘Siren Song’ is all suggestive wit and glee. Lepper is unfailingly supportive and comparably insightful: he and Palmer sound instinctively in accord with one another throughout. It’s a lovely disc. Do listen to it.