Carolyn Sampson and Joseph Middleton’s new album takes its name from the penultimate song of Walton’s A Song for the Lord Mayor’s Table, with its pointed, witty depiction of the contrast between life in London and life in the country. Its centrepiece, however, indeed the fulcrum round which the programme effectively swings, is the first recording of Huw Watkins’s Five Larkin Songs, of which Sampson gave the premiere in 2010. It’s a striking cycle in several ways.

Watkins probes the dark ironies and pessimism of Larkin’s verse with considerable insight, as hovering vocal lines and sparse piano figurations broaden towards lyricism in moments of nostalgia or crisis before fragmenting into disillusionment. The structure is admirably taut: the long central ‘Love Songs in Age’, in which music itself is equated with past emotional failures, is flanked by two bitter scherzos about solitude and money, framed in turn by reflections on desire turning sour and the terrible nature of lovelessness. It’s unnerving stuff, though it suits Sampson down to the ground. She phrases beautifully, floats high pianissimos with exceptional ease, and is always subtle in her approach to the text, though there are also some startling moments of declamatory ferocity that throw us off balance. Middleton similarly impresses, playing with reined-in intensity and superb dynamic control.

The rest of the recital is carefully structured in order to throw the cycle’s themes into relief. Larkin’s emphasis on nostalgia and solitude is echoed in songs about the mutability of love by Frank Bridge, in which ‘When you are old and grey’ forms a striking counterpart to Watkins’s ‘Love Songs in Age’. Quilter’s ‘Dream Valley’ and ‘By a Fountainside’ equate music with memory and loss respectively, while Vaughan Williams, poles apart from Larkin in mood, contentedly celebrates desire in ‘Silent Noon’ and evokes music’s powers to console and heal in ‘Orpheus with his lute’. Larkin’s disquieting view of mundanity, meanwhile, contrasts sharply with Walton’s depiction of the jostling vitality of London and the urbanity of his 1932 Façade songs, reworked for singer and piano from the 1923 original for actors and instrumentalists.

Sampson and Middleton perform this repertory wonderfully well. There’s a real tenderness in the central songs of Walton’s Lord Mayor’s Table that offsets the panache of the rest of the cycle, and the Façade Settings are delightful in their sly wit and grace. The Bridge songs are deeply felt: ‘Adoration’ builds to a rapt, ecstatic climax; ‘Mantle of Blue’ touches with its simple directness; and the energy of ‘Love went a riding’ is exhilarating. The Vaughan Williams group is particularly ravishing. Middleton’s playing here is all understated refinement, while Sampson allows the long lines to flow with exquisite poise, all the while keeping us constantly aware of the shifts of meaning in the texts and the depth of emotion that lies behind them: a beautiful performance, and arguably the high point of a very fine recital indeed.