A major-label Elgar song recital would seem to be overdue. Beyond the well-known Sea Pictures, ‘The Muleteer’s Serenade’, taken directly from Cervantes’s Don Quixote, is as adorable as anything Elgar ever wrote. ‘In Moonlight’ has such a charmingly demure personality of its own you wouldn’t immediately guess its thematic kinship with Elgar’s concert overture In the South. First recordings include an adaptation of Elgar’s Salut d’amour, Op 12, recast in song form by one Max Laistner. Most intriguing is ‘When the spring comes round’ from a First World War-era piece for speaker and orchestra titled Une voix dans le desert, Op 77.

That and other songs have visceral qualities not characteristic of Elgar’s more contemplative oratorios. The conundrum here and in Channel Classics’ ‘Complete Songs for Voice and Piano’ (4/08, 7/10) is that the composer’s sensibility has an underlying gravity, not always in the foreground, but something that prompts a stentorian approach that can count out intimacy of expression. Julia Sitkovetsky sometimes finds a viable balance, though she’s also operatic in ways that can undercut the music.

The sublime opening pages of Sea Pictures are deeply promising. Pianist Christopher Glynn captures the expanse and profound loneliness of the opening chords, requiring virtually no adjustment for those used to the more familiar orchestral version. Sitkovetsky’s voice is infused with wonder and awe. As the piece goes on, however, texts aren’t articulated as tellingly as the music deserves and her voice becomes a bit unsteady in the upper range. At the end of ‘Sabbath morning at sea’, a climactic vocal explosion interrupts the arc of the music. ‘Where corals lie’ shows how her sense of the music’s contours is a great expressive element. But in the final song, ‘The Swimmer’, poetic complexities are lost amid strained vocal leaps that bleach out the words, ending with a climactic B that’s all too reminiscent of Maria Callas’s late recordings. Nonetheless, in the limited discography of Sea Pictures – with female voice and piano accompaniment – Sitkovetsky is among the better recordings.

Thereafter, though, her wide vibrato in notes above the staff and a legato line that buries the words are problems that become more pervasive. There’s little of the linguistic authority that marks her Rachmaninov recital (Hyperion, 6/20). The Op 60 songs do call for intense expression, though Sitkovetsky loses details in her storm of near-Wagnerian vocal sound. All too seldom is the smaller-scale intimacy heard in ‘Pansies’. Most songs lie in the same part of her voice; timbre is not so differentiated. The two Channel Classics albums of Elgar songs are by no means eclipsed. Word to the wise: just because Elgar’s songs are in English and from a recent century doesn’t mean they’re any less challenging, in their own way, than Hugo Wolf.