Specially composed for Mark Padmore and Morgan Szymanski, Alec Roth’s song-cycle My Lute and I harnesses language and music in a highly effective alliance. The perennial problem of how to set English texts without them sounding stiff and awkward is not one that assails these nine songs of love by the 16th-century poet Thomas Wyatt. In some instances, Roth’s inspiration seems to go back to the golden-age madrigalists in syncopation and the colouring of vowels and consonants. With the guitar adding an appropriately delicate but also vibrant background, the songs flow naturally with their fluid rhythms and their instinctive, indeed inspired expressive contours that follow and enhance the sentiments of the verse. Mark Padmore’s flexible voice, with its high register being exploited to particularly fruitful effect, is the ideal vehicle for this repertoire, his clear enunciation and his relishing of the sounds of the words matching his lyricism and his agility in the tricky rhythmic deceits.

Mystery haunts ‘Dark Night’ and the Three Night Songs to verses by Vikram Seth, with some discreet exotic inflection in both the voice and the guitar accompaniment that fixes the mood in the mind’s ear and lends the settings a strangely other-worldly atmosphere. For ‘Autumnal’ Roth turns to the poetry of John Donne, finding a contemporary interpretation of Elizabethan sensibility to make the texts live and breathe. With delightful settings of five English folksongs, Roth knows how to use the voice with both respect and resourcefulness, qualities that Padmore and Szymanski echo beautifully.