‘I found I could get along better with the German than the English words’, confided Hubert Parry in a diary entry from 1874. Indeed, so thoroughly had the young composer absorbed the Germanic style that for his impressive Four Sonnets of Shakespeare (1873 82), he fashioned two entirely different vocal lines, one for the German translation by Friedrich Bodenstedt (1819 92) and another for Shakespeare’s original text. Fascinatingly, he had even considered adding an explanatory note to the published preface: ‘The German version is given because owing to certain peculiarities in the diction of these Sonnets it produces a better musical effect, without much loss to the sense.’ (The piano part, by the way, is identical to both.) It certainly makes for stimulating comparative listening – and definitely whets the appetite for Parry’s magnificent series of English Lyrics to come.

Three sets of songs – some 16 in all – by William Sterndale Bennett (his Opp 23, 35 and 47, published in 1842, 1855 and 1875 respectively) make up the lion’s share of the programme. The final number from Op 23 is heard in both English (‘Gentle Zephyr’) and German (‘Holder Zephyr wenn dein Hauch’); a great favourite of Stanford’s (who refers to it in a fond centenary tribute to his supportive teacher), it’s one of the highlights of a consistently pleasing and involving sequence, along with the settings of John Clare’s ‘Winter’s gone’ and Robert Burns’s ‘Castle Gordon’ from Op 35 (featuring German translations by Carl Klingemann, who had accompanied his good friend Mendelssohn on his tour of Scotland in 1829).

Walter Battison Haynes (1859-1900) was a new name to me. Born in Kempsey near Worcester, and later a composition professor at the Royal Academy of Music, he initially studied piano and composition at the Leipzig Conservatory under Bruno Zwintscher and Carl Reinecke. Published in 1885 by the Leipzig firm Kistner, his Vier Lieder, Op 8, evince a melodic fecundity and superior craftsmanship that vindicate Reinecke’s ringing endorsement of him as ‘one of our best pupils in composition at the moment; he has been working hard and has got talent’. (I would now like to hear Haynes’s Seven Elizabethan Songs, which, according to David Owen Norris in his perspicacious booklet essay, ‘bear comparison with Roger Quilter at his best’.)

I’m happy to report that mezzo-soprano Belinda Williams and tenor Mark Wilde bring disarming freshness, agility and intelligence to this rewarding repertoire. Norris, too, lends wonderfully idiomatic support throughout, the gratifying tone of his 1887 Pleyel grand piano beautifully captured by the microphones. Handsome presentation and full texts bolster the appeal of this enterprising offering from EM Records.