The baritone James Newby’s debut album ‘I Wonder as I Wander’ (1/21) announced the singer as a vividly sympathetic balladeer. If that collection had an elegiac feel, ‘Fallen to Dust’ veers even more to mournfulness – its theme is grief and death – but there is light as well as shade. Although something of an old head on young shoulders, Newby’s biggest asset in this album is his sincerity. Nothing is overwrought here; it all sounds freshly felt and, for the most part, beautifully voiced.

The album gets little darker than in its opening chapters: Jonathan Dove’s spare soliloquy ‘All you who sleep tonight’ (words by Vikram Seth) and Butterworth’s agonising ‘Requiescat’, a setting of Oscar Wilde in which the lament for a dead lover culminates in Newby’s howl, ‘all my life’s buried here’. There follows horror verging on the phantasmagoric: Rebecca Clarke’s ‘The Seal Man’ and Finzi’s ‘The Clock of the Years’, vignettes told by a horrified Newby not as narrator but as aghast participant.

From there, however, death is only part of the story. Newby’s sometimes parched low notes are the only blip in Finzi’s cycle Let us Garlands Bring, full of expression and nuance. ‘Who is Silvia?’ is hearty and robust, and the pearl of the set, ‘Fear no more the heat o’ the sun’, is not a grandiloquent showpiece but a ferocious eulogy that ends in exhausted resignation. Newby’s accompanist, Joseph Middleton, matches him for drama.

The material is not all top-drawer. Vaughan Williams’s ‘The Sky Above the Roof’ drifts past, bundled with Elgar’s ‘Pleading’, in which Newby at least has a good tug at the Edwardian stiff upper lip. Yet even if not all 10 Shropshire Lad songs by Arthur Somervell dazzle, Newby makes it sound as if this cycle (the first musical settings of the Housman poems) was written for him. Creating a narrator who is both naive and bitter, he makes a strong argument for the argument advanced by Richard Stokes in his booklet note – that Somervell consciously fashioned an English counterpart to Schumann’s Dichterliebe.

We all end in dust but the album does not. Middleton gets a burst of furious rhapsodising in Errollyn Wallen’s ‘About Here’, a poem that suggests escape and redemption from trauma and where Newby’s velvet tone beguiles and soothes. Finally, ‘RIP’ warns the hungry protagonist of Wolseley Charles’s ‘The Green-Eyed Dragon’ to his victims. Yet death, if inevitable, can still be postponed and the murderous beast is slain by rich plum cake. Newby digs in happily as he finds an unexpected happy end.