A reviewer learns to beware of the words “first”, “last” and “only”, but I’m happy to quote Tony Scotland, author of the excellent introductory note, who writes of “this first exclusive CD of songs by Berkeley”. He also points out that Berkeley wrote more for the voice than for any other instrument and that most of those 135 vocal works are songs. Yet, in the late Trevor Hold’s book on English song (Boydell: 2002), his name is not included even in the comprehensive index. That may be surprising; the general unfamiliarity is not.

They are songs for a fastidious ear and a mind that shuns overstatement, the banal and the sentimental. It is also a taste that takes as though by second nature to much that is French. There is a kinship with Britten, and in some of the later songs one may guess at a little of Tippett. The style is lyrical rather than declamatory, diatonic rather than atonal, but on the whole you don’t go there for a tune.

And you don’t go to James Gilchrist for what old-timers might call “red-blooded singing”. The first impression (and I’ve known this before) can be of a tone that is almost anaemic and enunciation that is precious. Such a view is almost immediately corrected, yet it persists from one occasion to another. But, as we have known for many years now, Gilchrist is his own man: a fine artist and particularly well suited to these songs. Anna Tilbrook is the totally admirable accompanist, with Alison Nicholls the harpist in the attractive Herrick settings.