Peter Dickinson and Philip Larkin make a surprisingly plausible pairing. The essential Englishness of their voices – Dickinson’s infused with Britten and Lennox Berkeley, Larkin as England’s miserablist-in-chief – was coloured by an engagement with American culture, radically so in Dickinson’s case. In his booklet-note Dickinson recalls meeting Larkin to discuss a collaboration but his 1989 composition for voice and ensemble, Larkin’s Jazz, was inspired by jazz performances he heard at Larkin’s memorial service. With King Oliver’s “Riverside Blues” and Bechet’s “Blue Horizon” as models, Dickinson created a musical gumbo by returning Larkin’s jazz-inspired poems to source, interwoven around instrumental commentaries.

The Nash Ensemble – augmented with saxophonist John Harle and trumpeter Paul Archibald – make an unexpectedly decent fist at evoking New Orleans salty-dog funk, responding to Dickinson’s slyly astute caricatures. Plummy Henry Herford sounds incongruously schoolmasterly as he intones about Bechet. But perhaps that’s the point: stiff Englishness admiring of, but alien from, the music? That was Larkin’s jazz.

Mass of the Apocalypse (1984) makes an apt coupling. Using the Apocalypse story from the Book of Revelation as an allegory for contemporary concerns, Dickinson contrasts formal compositional procedures – like the harmonic cycle underpinning the “Kyrie” – with stylistic lurches towards the blues and, in the “Kyrie”, overlaid strata of (presumably) uncoordinated choral speaking – a neat way of expressing early ’80s angst about the state we were in. I was also reminded of Tippett’s granite lyricism in the flute and piano Lullaby, the most intriguing of the accompanying miniatures.