Among the joys of Brian Giebler’s new disc is the focus on neglected song repertoire and composers. The American tenor and colleagues apply urgently sensitive artistry to works by British composers, most of them from the 20th century, all of them here devoted to texts about love and loss. The themes that bind ‘A Lad’s Love’ embrace friendship, sexuality, betrayal and nature, each enveloped in music of tender and youthful vibrancy.

Certainly Giebler is a model of those qualities as he imbues every phrase with warmth and clarity, initially in Ivor Gurney’s bucolic 1923 cycle Ludlow and Teme, whose seven songs are set to poems from AE Housman’s A Shopshire Lad. Unlike compatriots of the era, Gurney (1890-1937) avoided incorporating folk elements into his music (he wrote more than 300 songs), opting instead for lilting lyricism and buoyancy rooted in Romantic traditions. Giebler applies fresh yearning to the songs in vivid conversation with pianist Steven McGhee, violinists Katie Hyun and Ben Russell, viola player Jessica Meyer and cellist Michael Katz.

The tenor is also keenly attentive to nuance in songs by Ian Venables (the disc’s only 21st-century composer, represented by a luminous setting of Housman’s ‘Because I liked you better’), Peter Warlock, Roger Quilter, Benjamin Britten and John Ireland, the last of whose cycle We’ll to the Woods No More contains a piece for solo piano, ‘Spring will not wait’, that McGhee shapes with elegant beauty. He is also the superb anchor in a performance of Britten’s Canticle No 2, Abraham and Isaac, in which Giebler plays father to countertenor Reginald Mobley’s son. They bring fervent drama to these roles and merge voices to celestial effect as God.