Ian Bostridge and Ottorino Respighi are two names I never imagined would be in the same sentence, much less the same recording – in a rare collection of songs that are usually heard mixed in with other early 20th-century composers who enjoyed symbolist texts and saturated harmonies. In the booklet notes, Bostridge explains that this music was a lockdown discovery for him in what he calls ‘a treasure house of colourful and imaginative musical writing’. I agree, and I suspect so would Veronika Kincses, whose 1999 Respighi disc (Hungaroton) is one of the few others out there, and covers much of the same repertoire but with a lush voice that makes her disc a polar-opposite experience to Bostridge’s.

The many regions of Respighi’s brain are intentionally visited by Bostridge. Besides composing his well-known tone poems, Respighi was a musicologist who was deeply interested in ancient airs and dances, a linguist who sympathetically harmonised Scottish texts (an interesting, not unwelcome cultural collision), and, more personally, a depressive human being who could and would open his soul to his listeners in ‘Nebbie’ (‘Mists’), one of his most famous songs. The Respighi who composed the lovely, picturesque Christmas oratorio Lauda per la natività del Signore is also heard in the wide-eyed innocence of two Christmas songs, ‘Le repos en Égypte’ and ‘Noël ancien’.

The core of the recital is songs written to texts by such as Gabriele D’Annunzio, Antonio Rubino and like-minded poets, some of which can seem affected: one particular line by Vittoria Aganoor Pompilj, ‘Oh, to be plant, to be a leaf’ is set to music with a straight face. Respighi observed them all with great respect. Many of his through-composed songs use the poet’s stanzas like continuing chapters in a hothouse novel. On a micro level, hardly a semicolon passes without a poetic musical reaction.

The composer’s vast but precise use of harmony and colour – equal to and much like Debussy’s – is much in evidence in the consistently engrossing piano-writing: even the spare accompaniment of ‘Au milieu du jardin’ is a model of a few well-chosen notes. This master of musical description often limits himself to scene-painting, as in ‘Notte’, where he sets the scene and then allows the words to make their point. The solo-piano ‘Notturno’ included in the middle of the programme, beautifully played by Saskia Giorgini, is an apt continuation of the songs. And the vocal lines? Respighi had a number of female singers in his life, and these songs show they were quite well served.

Vocally, an echt British singer such as Bostridge might seem an unlikely interpreter and initially the outlook isn’t promising, with his nervous vibrato emerging strongly in the opening song. Soon he establishes a strong sense of cantabile, serving the rhapsodic qualities of the Italian text, reimagined with his own singular vocal resources. In the joyful ‘Le funtanelle’ (‘The Fountains’), Bostridge veers dangerously close to Italianate caricature. But in other songs he explores the lower depths of his range effectively in moments where the music calls for a sense of emotional desperation. Next, Bostridge is releasing an album of arias by Cavalli, Stradella, Cesti and Vivaldi. Might he be entering an Italian period?