By sheer coincidence, ‘Solitude’ appears to be tailor-made for mid-2020, though this new disc of music by Purcell, Schubert, Dove and Barber that examines various states of isolation was recorded in 2019. Arriving at my virtual doorstep during the pandemic lockdown, ‘Solitude’ opened valuable musical doors in a programme whose best-known work is Barber’s neglected Hermit Songs.

Thanks to the interpretative intelligence and emotional immediacy of James Gilchrist and Anna Tilbrook, most of the music seems current, and becomes even more so from reading Gilchrist’s own passionately written booklet notes. Solitude isn’t the only theme that runs through this programme. The subject matter often inspires compositional economy but also ingenuity that is selflessly put to the service of the music’s expressive goals. Prime example: Purcell’s ‘O! Solitude’, arranged for modern piano by Benjamin Britten, with that distinctive 17th-century British contentment-in-melancholy sensibility that unfolds over what Gilchrist identifies as a four-bar bass ground.

The one piece that doesn’t yet reach me is Schubert’s little-known, more curious than engaging ‘Einsamkeit’. The Josef Mayrhofer verse feels dated, while the 21-year-old Schubert attempts an A-Z tour de force of emotional and dramatic effects that attempts to one-up Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte but instead seems superficial.

In any case, the disc’s main events are Dove and Barber. Dove’s cycle Under Alter’d Skies, written for and premiered by Gilchrist in 2017, employs seven well-chosen cantos from Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s mid-19th-century In memoriam AHH. Written in memory of a friend who died at the age of 22, the cantos are mostly short enough to lend themselves to song. Spot-check comparisons between Dove’s musical settings and the original verse reveal no alterations. The opening song, ‘Fair Ship’, is a template of sorts for the rest of the cycle. A central musical gesture – highly atmospheric but pregnant with poetic ambiguities – captures the overall feeling of the poem that’s expanded in the piano-writing, not necessarily characterising specific lines but creating a back-lighting effect for what unfolds in the lyrical, highly singable vocal lines.

Nothing particularly complicated or revelatory happens in Dove’s musical treatments but the dividend is emotional directness. Broadly drawn musical ideas are full of peripheral details that make the effects feel fresh-minted, from the spare piano-writing in ‘Calm is the morn’ to the windy effects in ‘To-night the winds begin to rise’ and the plodding gait of ‘With weary steps’. Interestingly, ‘The voice is on the rolling air’ has airy arpeggios that recall (no doubt accidentally) La Monte Young’s avant-garde The Well-Tuned Piano. Most of the songs don’t really conclude, they just stop. Better that than contrived endings. I don’t know if this cycle is music for the ages but it certainly connects with me right now.

The Hermit Songs are classic middle-of-the-road Barber, though the anonymous texts from Irish monks (some translated by the likes of WH Auden) always go to unexpected places, such as a vision of a heavenly banquet in which the King of Kings has ‘a great lake of beer’. Why isn’t this 1953 piece done constantly?

Though Gilchrist’s voice is starting to show its mileage with some detectable spread in the sustained notes, he is a particularly positive presence here, deftly navigating the charm and tension of the piece’s sacred and profane elements. While Barber’s own piano accompaniments had an earthiness that seemed to say ‘Monks are people too’, Anna Tilbrook gives their rapturous side its due.

Nothing replaces the mid-1950s Leontyne Price recording (Sony) – not even her later recording of the piece – though Gilchrist’s fine-etched clarity with the vocal lines and Tilbrook’s extraordinary sympathy with the piano-writing – along with the Dove cycle – make this disc an apt acquisition for any musical shut-in.