The cover photo of grown men in a children’s playground gives one pause: is this what I will look like after hearing this album? Not likely. The programme is sophisticated, not necessarily beyond the reach of those under the age of 12 but with no attempts at cuteness. Richard Rodney Bennett’s portrayal of the mythical Old Woman who Lives in a Shoe, for example, is more a study in modern homelessness than a portrait of an overwhelmed matriarch. In any case, the diverse programme is for listeners with a wide point of reference for song repertoire – and can appreciate how pianist William Vann reveals unexpected harmonic similarities between Ives (in his Impressionistic nostalgia-without-sentimentality mode) and the rich but more contained Howells.

The programme is arranged around a series of subheads – ‘Fairy Tales and Cautionary Tales’, ‘Days Out and Adventures’, ‘Nursery Rhymes’ and ‘Lullabies and Bedtime’ – which tells you to be ready for anything in terms of musical periods and languages (which encompass English, German and French). There are old friends such as Britten’s arrangement of ‘Little Sir William’ as well as less-heard Howells excerpts from Peacock Pie, Op 33. Performances are curiously variable. Loewe’s ballad ‘Tom der Reimer’ is given an uninterested run-through. Then Schubert’s ‘Erlkönig’, which falls into somewhat the same genre, builds up to edge-of-the-seat suspense. Then again, the pathos of a starving child in Mahler’s ‘Das irdische Leben’ is strangely underplayed.

Too often, baritone Gareth Brynmor John seems careful to the point of being tentative. Words are given middling attention, with a somewhat wide vibrato that gets in their way. Only after re-reading the album notes was it clear what I was supposed to be hearing amid the crocodile tears in Liza Lehmann’s ‘Henry King’. In his durable 1997 recording of Lehmann songs, Neal Davies (Naxos, 2/98, 7/04) more resourcefully projects irony. The rowdy manner of Ives’s ‘The Circus Band’ benefits more from the lighter, more articulate touch of Jan DeGaetani (Nonesuch, 11/76) than John’s heavy-handedness.

The exception is the album’s centrepiece, Richard Rodney Bennett’s Songs Before Sleep, whose music has the kind of pictorial qualities and dramatic twists that show this great film composer at his best. Characterisations of these dark-tinged fairy tales is so consistently lively that the performances seem to come from a different disc. Nonetheless, Roderick Williams’s recording (NMC, 12/10) has greater appeal, with his beautiful diction and mellifluous pianism from Iain Burnside that’s missing from Vann. If nothing else, this disc put me in touch with some often-forgotten past recordings in this infrequently visited repertoire.