‘The songs of Roger Quilter seem to have been with me all my life’, James Gilchrist tells us in a booklet note for his new album with his regular recital partner, Anna Tilbrook. ‘Go, lovely rose’, which gives the disc its title, was, it would seem, among the first things he studied when he began singing lessons. ‘I loved it then,’ he continues, ‘and I have sung it countless times since: in fact, Anna and I often give it as an encore.’

He and Tilbrook now give us a considered survey of Quilter’s career, covering roughly a fifth of his output. Songs, early and late, are loosely grouped by subject matter – love and mortality, folk-song arrangements, songs linked by floral imagery and so on. The Op 6 Shakespeare group comes complete but is interwoven with other Shakespeare settings. Only the Mirza Schaffy songs, written to German texts during Quilter’s sojourn in Leipzig, are given as a formal set. ‘I have a special love’, Gilchrist writes, ‘for the slower, melancholy songs, and this is perhaps reflected in our selection here.’ And despite flashes of wit and brilliance, the prevailing mood is elegiac and reflective without ever becoming unduly sombre.

Gilchrist’s voice has lost some of its lustre of late, and an edge can creep into his tone under pressure: we hear it most notably, perhaps, in the rather fierce account of ‘Blow, blow, thou winter wind’, with which he opens. His artistry and powers of insight, however, remain very much intact. Words always tell, without the need to nudge or fracture lines. Colour and dynamics are immaculate. The understated passion of ‘Go, lovely rose’ itself and the sensual undertow of ‘Now sleeps the crimson petal’ (‘Slip into my bosom and be lost in me’) are beautifully judged. There’s some lovely soft singing here, above all in ‘Fear no more the heat o’ the sun’, where the shifting gradations in volume over a hushed dynamic range in the final stanzas are at once ravishing and extraordinarily moving.

Tilbrook, as always, is an excellent accompanist, instinctively knowing when to hold back and when to assert herself, though she well and truly comes into her own in ‘Barbara Allen’, where the piano to some extent carries the ballad with a series of increasingly complex variations beneath its successive stanzas. Approaches to Quilter can differ sharply, and some may prefer John Mark Ainsley’s more extrovert way with his music in his very different disc with Malcolm Martineau for Hyperion (11/96), or the darker weight of baritone Mark Stone and Stephen Barlow’s extensive survey, begun in 2013 on Stone’s own label (7/13). But Gilchrist and Tilbrook give us a fine, thoughtful recital, the best of which is at once affecting and superbly accomplished.