Nicky Spence and colleagues serve up a nourishing feast of Vaughan Williams’s vocal music, culminating in a performance of On Wenlock Edge which, in its thrilling assurance, strength of imagination and rapt instinct, inclines me to rank it alongside the very finest I know (Ian Partridge, Anthony Rolfe Johnson, John Mark Ainsley, Andrew Kennedy and James Gilchrist all spring to mind). I love the enviable hush and unruffled poise Julius Drake and the Piatti Quartet bring to the devastatingly moving ‘From far, from eve and morning’, the searing intensity of the climactic outburst in ‘Is my team ploughing’(‘Yes, lad, I lie easy, / I lie as lads would choose; / I cheer a dead man’s sweetheart, / Never ask me whose’) – and what intoxicating languor and (in the central section) icy chill these accomplished performers evoke in ‘Bredon Hill’, its overwhelming peak (‘Oh, noisy bells, be dumb’) projected by Spence with arresting impact. How memorable, too, are the final pages of ‘Clun’ with its sublime vision of a world beyond this one (‘Where doomsday may thunder and lighten / And little ’twill matter to one’).

Completed five years previously, in 1904, The House of Life comprises six settings from the eponymous collection of 100 sonnets by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828 82), the most famous number being the inspired and justly loved ‘Silent noon’. Spence and Drake do it absolutely proud, and likewise locate an abundance of wistful tenderness and fragrant beauty in those two sensitive settings that top and tail the cycle, namely ‘Love-sight’ and ‘Love’s last gift’ (which opens with an early iteration of that indelible descending phrase that launches the hymn-tune ‘For all the saints’ and the 1952 motet O taste and see).

Marvellous, too, to have such a superbly ardent, insightful account of the glorious Four Hymns for tenor, piano and viola. Dating from 1914 but not heard until 1920, these settings of texts by (among others) Dr Isaac Watts (1674-1748) and the metaphysical poet Richard Crashaw (1613 49) find the composer at his questing best (and what ravishing sostenuto tone from viola player Timothy Ridout in No 3, ‘Come Love, come Lord’). As for the three folk-song arrangements, the jaunty tune for ‘The Saucy Bold Robber’ will be familiar to RVW acolytes from its appearance in the 1906 Norfolk Rhapsody No 2, while Spence has a blast in the hapless exploits of ‘Harry the Tailor’ and wicked fun of ‘The Brewer’.

Production (Simon Kiln), engineering (Ben Connellan) and booklet notes (the ever-perceptive Francis Pott) are everything one could desire. In sum, a hugely enjoyable offering for the RVW sesquicentennial.