It’s appropriate that Alessandro Fisher’s debut on Rubicon should be a recording of a recital he gave at Wigmore Hall in 2021, for it was where he won the Kathleen Ferrier Competition in 2016 before going on to become, among other things, a Gramophone One to Watch. ‘A Gardener’s World’ was inspired by Fisher’s own garden, which became Mr and Mrs Fisher’s focus during lockdown when, as he puts it, ‘the tiniest flash of new colour, new life, brought with it a sense of hope’ that our dear world would heal and recover.

Of Schubert’s ‘Die Blumensprache’, which opens the disc, Richard Capell wrote, nearly a century ago, ‘let a pleasant singer take it up, one able to suggest ardour under the cover of playfulness’. Well, Fisher does just that in his warm-hearted embrace of the lyric, the first line of which might serve as the motto for the whole recital as it speaks of flowers revealing the feelings of the heart. The decorations on the words ‘Raube’ (‘seduction’) and ‘klagen’ (‘lament’) are poised and graceful, the modulations and rubato acutely judged by Fisher’s pianist, Anna Tilbrook.

In Mendelssohn’s ‘Das erste Veilchen’, he takes a long pause between verses, the voice unaccompanied now, the key switching to the minor, before he sings of the disappearing spring and the death of the violet. It’s just one instance of his innate insight into a familiar lyric. The inclusion of Clara’s ‘Das Veilchen’ (violets, anemones and daffodils are prominent throughout) was a happy pairing, the hop, skip and jump of the young shepherdess conveyed in the chirpy setting, the singer sharp on the narrative and subtly coloured, avoiding the possibility of Gemütlichkeit.

I’m inclined to rate Sibelius’s six Op 88 song as this recital’s pièce de résistance. Whether it be in the spine-tingling moment when the vocal line rises to a top B flat in that noble ode to the neglected thorn (‘The Thorn’), the heartbreak conveyed in ‘The Flower’s Fate’, the trilling of the lark in ‘Blue Anemone’ or the tranquil ‘The Two Roses’, the words battered and broken, delivered half-spoken, this is an interpretation of rare insight. In such company one may forgive the omission of the piano markings in ‘The Wood Anemone’.

The second half is of lighter stuff, but the intent is never in doubt, the idiom a sure thing. Two colourful, unashamedly popular ballads by Carlos Guastavino – the one concluding with a vocalise, the other a languorous tango – are vividly projected, the voice open and welcoming, as it is in the songs by the Catalan Eduard Toldrà, Fisher’s storytelling again spot on.

It’s good to hear the chansons sung by a man (none of course should be the preserve of one or the other). Fauré’s infectious ‘Le papillon et la fleur’ and Chausson’s ‘Les papillons’ are paired with Poulenc’s gravely beautiful ‘Fleurs’ from a song-cycle translated as ‘Bethrothal for fun’, leaving all implications open to the composer. The calm serenity of this melancholic song is conveyed with a voluptuous tone.

The English songs range from a teenage ditty, ‘The Language of Flowers’ by the 14-year-old Elgar, to Muriel Herbert’s odes to violets (poem by Herrick) and daffodils, where the poignant line about ‘the early-rising sun has not attain’d his noon’ might well be interpreted, as Fisher points out, as an elegy to the fallen of the First World War, the singer not holding back on his connection to that thought. Haydn Wood’s ‘Love’s Garden of Roses’, loudly applauded, was a guaranteed showstopper, the singer rolling his final R on ‘garden’, in a nod to John McCormack’s pioneering recording from 1918. The applause generates an encore with the Donald Swann/Michael Flanders ‘Misalliance’, any suggestion of whimsy parked at bay, in a gentle and intimate rendering, reminding us that this is a song that originated in a West End revue, At the Drop of a Hat.

I’d suggest that not since Martin Isepp accompanied Janet Baker on that bargain Saga long-player from many moons ago has a British singer made a more auspicious recital debut on record.