Soprano Ruby Hughes’s previous album, ‘Echo’ (1/23), focused mainly on Baroque and contemporary repertoire, with occasional nods towards folk music. Although ‘End of My Days’ casts its net wider (including Debussy, Ravel and Mahler), the folk element is never far away. It’s an approach that naturally lends itself to Hughes’s flowing lines and subtle, sparing use of vibrato, as heard in Brian Elias’s setting of 19th-century poet John Clare’s ‘Meet Me in the Green Glen’. A steelier intensity belongs to Hughes’s rendition in comparison with Susan Bickley on ‘The NMC Songbook’ (5/09). Hughes’s increasingly urgent entreaties transform Elias’s folk idyll into something darker, more disquieting and bittersweet.

A gentler folk quality is imparted in Vaughan Williams’s ‘Along the Field’, which is then transformed into a lonesome lament in John Dowland’s ‘Go, crystal tears’ and ‘Flow, my tears,’ the two settings subtly and delicately arranged for string quartet by David Bruce.

The disc’s highlights nevertheless belong to those moments where soprano and quartet – the latter featuring the impressive Manchester Collective guided by inspirational violinist Rakhi Singh – combine to produce moments of startling power, beauty and delicacy. John Tavener’s settings of Anna Akhmatova’s poetry prompt Hughes to lay out a richer smorgasbord of vocal expressions, often conveyed within the space of a few fleeting phrases, from the pleading primal cry at the end of ‘Dante’ to innocent childlike enunciations in ‘Boris Pasternak’. Errollyn Wallen’s ‘End of My Days’ provides another opportunity for Hughes to flex the vocal muscles, Wallen’s wide leaps and soaring lines suffusing the music with incantatory and celebratory qualities.

In an album conceived during the dark days of lockdown, Hughes asks what kind of music might attend to the prevailing concerns of this time. Listening to ‘End of My Days’ prompts further questions about how one’s access to (and engagement with) music has been shaped since those days. The end might signal a new beginning after all.