The opening moments of this collection land you in a collision of disparate stimuli. The opening bars of the first song all but quote Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No 2, creating an ominous introduction to ‘Let the florid music praise’ (the upbeat title to the WH Auden poem at hand) and unfolding with anything-but-florid spare, introspective music by Peter Dickinson (b1934).

The modern world of British song, as represented here, has little semblance of a national identity. Past eras of British song have an inviting sense of emotional and harmonic solidity, often with pastoral, nostalgic texts. Not so in this new collection. Even moments of harmonic richness (both in Dickinson and others) are harmonically unstable. But the only common characteristic among these songs – the majority of which are first recordings – is a personal, unfiltered, often gritty expression that celebrates the individual rather than any collective personality. Tellingly, the booklet notes by pianist/composer Nathan Williamson refer to some of the shorter songs as ‘vignettes’ rather than a more elevated term such as ‘haiku’.

Madeleine Dring’s Five Betjeman Songs (referring to John Betjeman, 1906 84) fool you into thinking the impressionistic ‘A Bay in Anglesey’ sets the tone for the rest of the cycle. Quite the opposite: vernacular blues characterises the seedy, indoor world of ‘Song of a Nightclub Proprietress’, in which casual dissoluteness gives way to the terrors of old age. Dring (1923 77) refused to pass judgement on the subject matter, as if to say this is some people’s normality. Just as a plurality of musical manners is represented here, so are the lifestyles that are admitted into this world of art song.

In his composing life, pianist Williamson (b1978) goes from catastrophe to lament in a matter of seconds in some of the more crucial moments of The Little That Was Once a Man and into still darker realms in the second of his two song-cycles on the album, Not being …, that obliquely riffs on Oedipus with some unsavoury sexual imagery and unorthodox vocal demands. The Unlit Suburbs by John Woolrich (b1954) has a song describing how rats eat visitors to their realms. The Eye of the Blackbird by Geoffrey Poole (b1949) is the best in this collection, based on the famous Wallace Stevens poems Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. Some poems are as short as a few lines, with musical treatment that ranges from the extremely spare to a manner so expressionistic that you feel as if you’re inside the composer’s rather busy head.

Tenor James Gilchrist is at his best throughout. So solid is his enunciation and the connection between words and meaning that one need not follow the printed texts in the booklet after the first hearing. But the ‘unlit suburbs’ of this collection – however familiar they are to me in real life – are not what I want in any art-song experience. I’m glad to have taken this journey. I admire and respect the curatorial choices and the artistry that brought this music into being. I would recommend it to any adventurous musical soul. But be forewarned: this disc is not a walk in the park.