Only last January I was heaping praise upon Roderick Williams’s distinguished advocacy of Elgar’s orchestral songs (Chandos, coupled with Andrew Davis’s terrific BBC PO Falstaff), and now Somm offers us an even more comprehensive overview of this same repertoire. Duties are shared between the Dutch baritone Henk Neven and mezzo-soprano Kathryn Rudge (former BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artists, both), and they are excellently supported in turn by Barry Wordsworth and the BBC Concert Orchestra. Liverpool-born Rudge is in refulgent voice for the darkly passionate Op 60 diptych of 1910 (featuring texts by Pietro d’Alba – Elgar’s own pseudonym, this, and a sly reference to his daughter Carice’s white angora pet rabbit!), while it’s hard to imagine more sheerly beguiling renderings of either ‘The Wind at Dawn’ (1888) or ‘Pleading’ (a wistful setting from 1908 of a poem by Arthur Salmon). If, in the three Op 59 songs, Neven doesn’t eclipse Roderick Williams in terms of imaginative flair or idiomatic word-pointing (the haunting ‘Twilight’ being a case in point), his remains a most pleasing contribution; certainly, he gives a splendidly lusty account of ‘The Pipes of Pan’.

Elsewhere, Neven and Wordsworth make out an unexpectedly convincing case for the patriotic ‘Follow the Colours’ – originally requested by Novello in 1908 and first heard at the Royal Albert Hall’s Empire Day concert under the title of ‘Marching Song’ – but not even Rudge can redeem ‘The King’s Way’, a vehicle for the contralto Clara Butt to words of dubious quality by Alice Elgar and the trio melody from the Pomp and Circumstance March No 4 celebrating the formal opening of ‘the newest street in London town’. Last, but definitely not least, comes Elgar’s wonderful 1901 incidental music for Grania and Diarmid: Rudge proves a deeply eloquent exponent of ‘There are seven that pull the thread’, and Wordsworth secures some ideally atmospheric playing both here and in the magnificent ‘Funeral March’.

At no extra cost, Somm throws in an intriguing programme of solo songs excellently recorded for the Elgar Society by Paul Arden-Taylor at Southampton’s Turner Sims. Rarities include ‘The Mill Wheel: Winter’ (1892) and ‘Muleteer’s Song’ (1894, to verses from Cervantes’s Don Quixote); Elgar subsequently reworked both for his 1896 cantata King Olaf, though in the event only the former made it into the published version (in the section entitled ‘The Death of Olaf’, to be precise). The Swiss soprano Nathalie de Montmollin receives stylish support from pianist Barry Collett (who also provides usefully detailed booklet notes), but her tone and vibrato are not the most ingratiating, and there are also occasional tuning issues to contend with. No matter, for the main contents alone, this is a release which has already afforded me much pleasure.