Here’s yet another valuable instalment in Somm’s exploration of Charles Villiers Stanford. The Three Songs of Robert Bridges (1891) are new to the catalogue, and this is also the first recording of the 1907 Songs of Faith in their entirety. Comprising – and initially published as – two sets of three poems by Tennyson and Whitman, the latter makes an imposing curtain-raiser, the commanding partnership of Roderick Williams and Andrew West distilling a keen dramatic instinct and powerful range of expression that make you sit up and listen. Annotator Jeremy Dibble relates how Stanford had hoped to make something of a splash with the Whitman settings by refashioning material from ‘To the Soul’ and ‘Joy, Shipmate, Joy!’ into a work for chorus and orchestra entitled Song to the Soul to be performed at the 1915 Norfolk Festival in Connecticut. In the event he had to content himself instead with orchestrating ‘To the Soul’ and ‘Tears’, which were delivered by the then foremost American bass-baritone Clarence Whitehill (1871-1932).

Williams and West also excel in the delectably fresh, euphonious Three Songs of Robert Bridges, while tenor James Way proves an ardent champion of The Triumph of Love (1907), five settings of sonnets by the composer’s cousin Edmond Holmes (1850-1936). An appealing sequence they make, too, the dark grandeur of Nos 1, 3 and 5 counterbalanced by the altogether gentler Nos 2 and 4 (‘I think that we were children long ago’ strikes me as an especially bewitching creation). In June 1906 Stanford orchestrated the last three of the set; and soprano Olga Ouroussoff sang two of them under the baton of her husband Henry Wood at Queen’s Hall on October 29, 1909. We’re also treated to four memorable numbers from the 1895 comic opera Shamus O’Brien, an enterprise that proved enormously successful at home and abroad (it even ran on Broadway for no fewer than 50 performances).

Last but not least, Stanford’s legendarily droll humour is on full display in the 24-minute sequence of Nonsense Rhymes, rescued from the composer’s papers and published by Stainer & Bell in 1960, and mischievously attributed on the title-page of the manuscript to a certain ‘Karel Drofnatski, born on the River Yeffil in the Province of Retsniel’. The delights come thick and fast in this 24-minute sequence of 14 limericks by Edward Lear that pokes fun at, among others, Grieg (‘The Hardy Norsewoman’), Handel (‘The Absent Barber’), Brahms (‘Nileinsamkeit’), Tchaikovsky (‘Tone Poem’), Richard Strauss (‘Gongdichtung’) and Wagner (‘A Visit of Elizabeth’). The purely instrumental ‘Limmerich ohne Worte’ literally quotes the first nine bars of Mendelssohn’s Song without Words, Op 53 No 4; Drofnatski’s own postscript helpfully tells us that the music embodies ‘a specimen pattern or model, to which any poem of the Limerick type can be sung’.

A hugely enjoyable anthology, then, and prospective purchasers can rest assured that production values and presentation leave nothing to be desired. A hat-tip, too, to whoever chose the particularly fetching, plein-air portrait by Irish artist William Orpen (1878-1931) that adorns the front cover.