The first thing one needs to know about ‘A Musical Zoo’ is that bass-baritone Ashley Riches, the album’s instigator, is a cat person – and in my book, that earns him enough goodwill to land him in the Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau zone.

In fact, Riches’s animal devotion is indiscriminate – ‘I love ’em all: great and small, soaring and slithering, the noble, the elegant, and the just plain weird’, he writes in the booklet notes – which gives him a good (but not infallible) compass for repertoire choices and performance approaches. The album is a natural history museum in music, though seemingly obvious inclusions such as Poulenc’s Le bestiaire are absent in favour of songs with an extra dimension of animal psychology lacking in the Apollinaire verses. Yes, Schubert’s ‘Die Forelle’, which begins the recital, is built on obvious musical imagery but also confronts the betrayal of the trout’s catch. Elsewhere, Riches doesn’t take the easy way out: Wolf’s hectic ‘Der Rattenfänger’ and Mussorgsky’s rhetorically extravagant ‘Song of the Flea’ test even his limits.

His bass-baritone voice has a rock-solid core that, in the past, gave him needed muscle with Beethoven and allowed him to assume multiple vocal guises in Bernstein’s Wonderful Town (LSO Live, 11/18). On this album, both he and pianist Joseph Middleton take a robust approach to the animal world, even with Fauré’s butterflies and flowers. But he also effectively floats upper-range notes in Ravel’s more delicate moments.

A more subtle hallmark is his sympathy: the great Gérard Souzay seems to mock the peacock’s vanity in Ravel’s Histoires naturelles (Testament, 7/52, 4/04) while Riches doesn’t pass judgement, perhaps understanding that vanity keeps the animal going. In Schumann’s ‘The Lion’s Bride’, you can’t sympathise with the lion tearing the song’s female protagonist to pieces, but the way Riches builds the narrative, you at least understand.

Riches is at his best in English-language songs including Barber’s affectionate slice of life in ‘The Monk and his Cat’. The big discovery, for me, was Howells’s ‘King David’, in which the depressed monarch is cured by a nightingale – or, more concretely, Howells’s lush, gorgeous harmonies, rendered so beautifully by pianist Middleton.

Ogden Nash’s Musical Zoo, however, fails to delight. This curious 1947 children’s book contains 20 micro songs by Vernon Duke characterising everything from germs to jellyfish with facile rhymes. Never mind that Duke also wrote symphonies under his original name Vladimir Dukelsky; these songs are all under a minute. At times, Riches resorts to the boisterous New Yorker voice that was perfectly appropriate in his Wonderful Town recording but makes these songs seem even more slight than they are. The listener’s reward for wading through this stuff is Britten’s ‘The Crocodile’, showing the youthful composer recklessly acting up in ways that have to be heard to be believed.