A hundred recordings – it’s a milestone worth celebrating, and soprano Carolyn Sampson does it in style with a recital that’s more than a set of party pieces.

The album’s title, ‘But I like to sing …’, is playful, a nod to Bernstein’s Five Kid Songs with its arresting opening declaration ‘I hate music!’ and provocative definition: ‘Music is a lot of folks in a big dark hall, where they really don’t want to be at all!’ Sampson’s various song-groupings – spanning lieder, French, English and American song, even a carol – together add up to a refutation, a mission statement for what else music can, or should, be.

Music can be man-made – Barber’s ‘Slumber Song of the Madonna’, restrained and achingly simple in Sampson and pianist Joseph Middleton’s artless delivery – or natural: the breezes of Wolf’s ‘An eine Äolsharfe’, scattering petals with infinite delicacy in Middleton’s ravishing postlude. It can burst out in shared joy, as we hear in Deborah Pritchard’s newly commissioned ‘Everyone Sang’, rippling between voice and piano in waves of energy, or remain interior like Parry’s ‘My heart is like a singing bird’ – gloriously and unashamedly rhapsodic here.

It can also be a vessel for human experience – love, death, desire, creativity. And it’s here we get some unusual programming. The three Bilitis songs aren’t Debussy, they’re by his near-contemporary Rita Strohl. Pierre Louÿs’s erotic texts find their match in Strohl’s suggestive lyricism – the piano stripped away almost entirely in ‘Bilitis’, Sampson’s slender, supple voice as naked as the heroine herself. And there’s more indecent delight from Joseph Marx’s ‘Nocturne’, tumbling blossoms captured in the trickling lushness of the piano-writing (liquid under Middleton’s fingers), as well as Saariaho’s heady ‘Parfum de l’instant’, piano reinvented as a harp, Sampson’s sustained notes hanging bell-like in the air. All that ecstasy needs a corrective, which arrives in the manic, chattering energy of Cheryl Frances-Hoad’s Ada Lovelace-inspired ‘Something more than mortal’, an unaccompanied monologue capturing the rhythmic ‘music’ of maths, and the breathless patter of Poulenc’s ‘Fêtes galantes’.

There’s much more besides – a world of repertoire and life packed into a short recital. It’s a portrait of an artist who has shown us many faces on those 100 discs but whose voice remains a constant: sweet, flexible, alive to the text. And always intelligent.