Once again we have a recital disc perfectly recommendable in itself but issued so closely after another with a very similar programme that a critic’s first duty is to draw attention to the other version and review with that also in mind. On Wenlock Edge and Ludlow and Teme were coupled by James Gilchrist with Anna Tilbrook and the Fitzwilliam String Quartet (Linn, 9/07), who included The Curlew by Warlock and Bliss’s Elegiac Sonnet. In place of those, this new recording offers a set of four songs by Ian Venables.

Under the title Songs of Eternity and Sorrow, Venables selects four of the posthumously published poems of Housman, employing the same combination of voice and instruments as Vaughan Williams and Gurney. The settings are as strong as the poems, and that is saying much. All are intensely felt, two of them fiercely so. The third, “Oh who is that young sinner?” is formally the scherzo, but its subject (in the refrain “Oh they’re taking him to prison for the colour of his hair”) clearly has the fate of Oscar Wilde in mind. Venables writes with passion, and the performances catch his intentions faithfully.

Ludlow and Teme is similarly well served and is at no disadvantage when compared with the earlier version. Andrew Kennedy, I find, has the feeling for this more satisfyingly than for the Vaughan Williams. A return to James Gilchrist’s recording confirms its superiority in that work, the singer more imaginatively involved, the playing more finely textured. So choice depends on where the priorities lie. Whatever the answer to that, an aquaintance with Ian Venables’s Op 36 is certainly one worth making.