Stephen Wilkinson, who turned 98 this spring, is probably best known as the conductor who led the BBC Northern Singers from 1954 until they became the Britten Singers in 1993. As a composer, however, he has a substantial body of vocal and choral music to his credit, and ‘The Sunlight on the Garden’ marks the first appearance on disc of a selection of his songs, written over a career spanning 80 years. The driving force behind it is his daughter and champion, the mezzo Clare Wilkinson, for whom some of his more recent songs were written.

She herself compares him to Finzi, Gurney and Quilter. There are, however, elements of expressionism in his music, an emotional concentration and a sharp sense of irony that make him at times strikingly original. Yeats features prominently in a choice of poets which ranges from Shakespeare to Auden and MacNeice, though, Coleridge excepted, he seemingly avoids the major Romantics. Settings are rooted in textual detail and accompaniments are succinct, with rarely an extraneous note. There are fine things here. A spectral scherzo summons the ghosts that haunt the vicarage lawn in a setting of Brooke’s ‘Grantchester’, and the text fragments as time runs out in the perpetuum mobile of ‘The Hour-Glass’. The harmonic irresolution of ‘At the Manger’ probes the Virgin Mary’s anguish at the thought of Christ’s future suffering. ‘Politics’ says everything that needs to be said about middle-aged responsibility and erotic regret in just over a minute.

Divided between four singers and two pianists, the songs are persuasively done, too. Clare Wilkinson’s warm tone and quiet restraint in ‘At the Manger’ and ‘Heaven’ contrast with the more overt brightness of Mhairi Lawson, exquisite in ‘Winter Snow’ and ‘Proud Songsters’. Matthew Brook has a nice line in roguish irony, heard to excellent advantage in ‘Running to Paradise’ and the epigrammatic ‘Kiss’. Best of all, perhaps, is James Gilchrist, whose wonderful way with words enables him to encompass the bitter humour of ‘Chapels’, the sweetness of ‘Grantchester’ and the dark lyricism of ‘The Sunlight on the Garden’, a wartime setting of MacNeice that gives the disc its title. Ian Buckle and Anna Markland are the exemplary pianists.