The five Binyon Songs (2010 12) that open the programme are his latest, not conceived originally as a cycle. The concluding ‘The Burning of the Leaves’ was written to commission in 2010 and the others added ‘purely for [the composer’s] own enjoyment’ two years later. There is a fleeting flavour of Britten about the opening ‘Nature’ but otherwise Pickard’s music develops in quite un-Brittenish directions. These songs are a model of word-setting in their clarity of focus, the music truly interpreting and providing context for Binyon’s poems.

In The Borders of Sleep (2000 01), Pickard’s context is a half-awake soldier at the Western Front, waiting to go over the top, dreaming of home. Again, his initial idea was for stand-alone songs, but the allusive nature of the poetry of Edward Thomas (1878-1917) – in which the Great War trenches are often not overtly depicted but evoked seemingly from afar – inspired the present more integrated cycle. These and the Binyon Songs are beautifully sung by Roderick Williams, who inhabits the tonal and expressive worlds of each number with tremendous conviction. The Phoenix (1992) is as much a 16-minute cantata for soprano and piano as a song, kaleidoscopic in expressive profile. Here, Pickard endeavoured ‘to amplify in musical terms the ecstatic lyricism of the original [Anglo-Saxon] poem’. Eve Daniell provides a sensitive and well-formed account but sounds thin and strained in the stratospherically high passages. Simon Lepper accompanies both singers in exemplary fashion. Beautifully recorded, highly recommended.