Grace Williams’s reputation has, for many years, been predicated on her abilities as an instrumental composer, notably the two works she wrote during the war – the Fantasia on Welsh Nursery Tunes (1940) and Sea Sketches (1944) – and pieces such as Penillion (1955) and the Trumpet Concerto (1963). Other works that accentuate her affinity for instrumental music include the Sextet (1931), the Suite for nine instruments (c1934), the two symphonies of 1943 and 1956, the fine Violin Concerto (1950), heard at the Proms in 2023, and the Ballads for Orchestra (1968). However, she was no stranger to vocal music, given her upbringing within the Eisteddfod tradition and the choirs conducted by her father, and the few surviving works of the 1920s also suggest that music for voices played an important part in her formative education.

This new recording surveys the full panoply of Williams’s output for solo voice and piano throughout her creative career in which she explored the ‘art song’ and the folk arrangement, using both English and Welsh languages and reflecting a broad taste and knowledge of the poetic literature. The early settings of Ben Jonson’s ‘Slow, slow, fresh fount’ (c1925) and three folk settings of traditional Welsh words, ‘Mari Lywd’ (from the Welsh carolling tradition), the doleful ‘Ffarwel i Langyfelach’ and the more buoyant ‘Llangynwyd’ (all conjectured to be from the 1920s) suggest an awareness of her older, Georgian contemporaries Quilter, Warlock and Moeran and not a little of her RCM teacher Vaughan Williams in their harmonic parameters, though by songs such as ‘I had a little nut tree’, using traditional English words, and Mary Webb’s more sensuous nature poem ‘Green Rain’, written in the 1930s, these initial influences had clearly been assimilated into a more contemporary harmonic vocabulary.

More forceful and declamatory is ‘Stand forth, Seithenin’ (from The Black Book of Carmarthen); and ‘The Song of Mary’ (1939), a setting of the traditional biblical text for the Annunciation, is unusually brooding and emotionally dissonant rather than the more conventional expression of joy and elation. Two substantive songs from 1949, ‘Fairground’ and ‘Flight’, possibly written as companion pieces, are more experimental in their mixture of vocal delivery, piano accompaniment and structural complexity. These are perhaps her most ambitious canvases for the idiom and are worth more detailed scrutiny. ‘When thou dost dance’ (1951) looks back more to the style of her earlier songs from the 1920s, as does ‘Ow, Ow, Tlysau’, but both retain a cogency and clarity in their use of 16th- and 17th-century poems. By contrast, ‘To Death’ (1953) is a stark, dirge-like, almost unrelentingly austere interpretation of Caroline Southey’s eery text (with a duration of over seven minutes and a strikingly restricted dynamic barely rising above piano), which seems to share something of the bleakness of Holst’s Egdon Heath or the finale of Vaughan Williams’s Sixth Symphony, though its harmonic world shares more with Benjamin Britten. The theme of death, which appears to have haunted Williams’s inner ruminative world, continued in Edward Thomas’s well-known war poem ‘Lights Out’ (1965), a capacious setting worthy of comparison with Gurney’s setting of the 1920s, and Shakespeare’s ‘Fear no more the heat o’ the sun’ (1967), more severely introspective than the lyrically reflective elucidation we know from Finzi’s setting of 1942.

The album also features a selection of Williams’s folk-song arrangements, for which she had a genuine flair. Mainly composed in the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s at a time when such products were highly marketable, especially in the education sector (notably in schools and the BBC) where, until the late 1940s, the composer sought employment, they reveal a captivating exuberance. Moreover, the national sources of her arrangements were wide and varied – English, Welsh, Russian, French and Yugoslav – and the character of each text and melody gave rise to infectious and inventive accompaniments, all of which show a talent for strophic variation. Songs that stick in the mind are the French ‘Chevalier du guet’ (1949), the Four Folk Songs (1950 51) and the affecting love song ‘Cariad Cyntaf’ (possibly from the 1940s or ’50s), which Williams deftly adapted from a melody she considered to be incomplete.

The performances by Jeremy Huw Williams and Wendy Hiscocks are committed and sympathetic. Just occasionally the intonation is a little wayward in some of the more sustained melody, which is perhaps hampered here and there by Williams’s slightly excessive vibrato. Nevertheless, this is a recording worth investigating of music by a much underrated and neglected composer.