While not an ardent fan of the art song medium, I have to say that this new Navona album of songs, song-sets and cycles by Samuel Adler (b1928) is a delight. Adler is a composer familiar enough to collectors, his music on dozens of currently available releases, particularly from the Milken Archive but also on Albany, Linn, Toccata Classics and many others. A pupil of Copland, Hindemith and Piston, Adler – himself a teacher for over six decades – is a composer with plenty to say and the technique to say it succinctly.

Most of the 31 songs here come from early in Adler’s career, just after his military service (1950 52), although the Four Songs About Nature, setting poems by James Stephens, date from just beforehand. In his booklet notes, Adler refers to these Coplandesque songs (with a dash of Hindemith in the accompaniment) as his ‘opus one’. They make a nice, compact set, sung sympathetically by Rebecca Karpoff (a touch shrill in one or two places), as are Songs About Love (1953), settings of Edmund Waller, Philip Sidney and Oliver Goldsmith.

Adler’s natural talent for word-setting is manifest throughout, whether in the stand-alone In Thine Own Image (1955, to a poem by Fania Kruger) or Songs About Time (1954 – called Songs About the Times of Man on the composer’s website), both sung nicely by Freda Herseth, as are the pairs of Portuguese and Japanese songs. The five rather Brittenish Unholy Sonnets (1985) are neither sonnets nor particularly unholy but are delivered strongly by Joseph Evans, who also sings Wish for a Young Wife (1966, four songs to words by Theodore Roethke), which contains the one – minor – miscalculation: its third song, ‘Her Wrath’, is too brief.

All bar the last set are accompanied sensitively and with poise by Cary Lewis. In Songs with Winds (1966), however, Adler deploys a wind quintet. Given that Adler was also experimenting with a more expressionist harmonic language, this provides a fuller, slightly Hindemithian sound and spikier texture for the album’s culmination. Atlanta Winds provided exemplary support for Rebecca Karpoff at the time but are no longer playing together. (Navona provide no recording dates or locations.) An entertaining album.