Most names here will be familiar to those who know mid-20th-century music in the UK but not necessarily as art-song composers, or as composers at all. Howard Ferguson created authoritative editions of Schubert’s piano sonatas, Rebecca Clarke was a touring viola player and Phyllis Tate a noted educator. Yet all were composers whose distinction went beyond being accomplished. In different ways, their songs are fascinatingly less mediated than those who composed for a living. Their originality doesn’t qualify these songs as ‘outsider art’ – though the choice of words and manner of expressing them is highly personal, without concern for the needs of the marketplace.

If placed on a spectrum between literary and musical orientation, these songs would veer more towards the rhetorical. Vocal lines serve the verse without usual melodic regularities that catch the ear. Keyboard-writing is highly independent of the vocal lines with great flights of fantasy too personal to fall into any school of composition. The controlled randomness of Elizabeth Maconchy’s rainstorm scene from Twelfth Night, Tate’s extremes of light and shade en route to the gallows in Walter Raleigh’s pre-execution ‘Epitaph’ and the stark, bass-heavy chords of Clarke’s ‘Tiger, Tiger’ all feel arrestingly unfiltered. In the ongoing recorded collaborations of tenor James Geer and pianist/musicologist Ronald Woodley, with discs exploring lesser-known Holst and Walton (7/20), this collection most clearly gives an alternative view of 20th-century British music.

The literary factor here is extremely high and diverse. Ferguson’s Discovery cycle is based on the bitterness-tinged verse of the long-disabled Denton Welch (1915-48); most intriguingly, Ferguson paints a scene of static, melancholy stillness in the song ‘Babylon’, leaving plenty of emotional room for what the listener might bring to the piece. Maconchy’s artistic ambitions take her to Donne’s ‘Hymn to God the Father’, with through-composed form lacking strong tonal ties but loosely organised around an evolving ostinato until the final lines reach harmonic consonance with the conquering of fear.

Clarke’s ‘The Seal Man’, based on John Masefield’s gender-reversed mermaid tale about a supernatural male taking an innocent woman to her death below the waves, takes a bit of the cruelty out of the original narrative, forcing the listener to ask if the tale is about liberation, heedlessness or tragedy. Arguably, Clarke’s songs are the most distinctive on the disc, including her ‘Cradle Song’, whose harmonies eloquently anticipate the heartbreak to come in a newborn’s life. At times, her songs seem like miniature tone poems for voice and piano.

The Finzi set creates an important counterpoint to the rest. From the first of his Thomas Hardy settings in Till Earth Outwears, the listener is in the more comfortable terrains of traditional British art song, with more folk-tinged melodic lines and regular rhythms. One might even find Finzi a tad bland in such adventurous company, though it’s important to remember what these other composers departed from.

Much of this music has been recorded elsewhere. Kathleen Ferrier recorded Ferguson’s Discovery (Decca, 11/75) , though Ernest Lush’s light-touch pianism lacks the stark edge from which the music most clearly speaks. More recently, James Gilchrist turned Clarke’s ‘The Seal Man’ into a good gothic tale more than a parable of self-sacrificial love (Somm, 1/21). But even for those familiar with this repertoire, the sequence of the album is one aspect of the special insights offered here. Neither tenor Geer nor pianist Woodley is a high-octane star presence but both are clear, engaging conduits of a heady, dense collection of music that requires and rewards repeated listening.