This collection of English songs (in this instance songs in English, since it contains two songs by Americans) is a live recording by the soprano Sophie Bevan and the pianist Sebastian Wybrew at the Wigmore Hall on December 14, 2014 (replete with applause). Marking the centenary of the beginning the First World War, the programme of songs topically reflects on the futility and vaingloriousness of war (ominously prefaced by Finzi’s ‘At a Lunar Eclipse’), and those composers who were embroiled in the conflict in different ways, whether in combat on land or sea, or left at home to fret and pray.

The significance of the songs is further enhanced by their groupings into differing areas of sentiment including the popular songs of the day such as Ivor Novello’s ‘We’ll gather lilacs’, Robert Weston’s ‘Goodbye ee’ and Nat Ayer’s ‘If I were the only girl’. Bevan and Wybrew perform these with panache, charged as they are with real nostalgia. The section ‘Call to Arms’ includes Somervell’s little-known ‘To Lucasta’, a beautifully languid interpretation of Gurney’s ‘Most Holy Night’ (with plenty of rubato from Wybrew in the affecting coda) and the evocative ‘Roses of Picardy’ by Haydn Wood.

There is a nice spread of Britten folk song arrangements, which act as useful points of contrast. The pathos of Dibdin’s ‘Tom Bowling’ in the group ‘At Sea’ is irresistible, as is Bevan’s rendering of Elgar’s darkly brooding ‘Submarines’, assisted by her beautifully controlled intonation and careful phrasing. Gurney’s ‘The ship’ also has compelling fluidity in its ever-changing harmonic background and a captivating yearning in its final postlude, which Wybrew injects with delicious insight.

In the group ‘Bereavement’, yearning is a conspicuous sentiment that haunts Ireland’s setting of Rupert Brooke’s ‘Spring sorrow’, Liza Lehmann’s ‘When I am dead, my dearest’ (she lost her elder son during the war) and Frank Bridge’s moving ‘Come to me in my dreams’, a song of 1906 revised in 1918. Warlock’s comforting ‘My own country’ figures neatly in ‘After the Armistice’, particularly the reverie of its last verse, and both performers excel in the austere atmosphere of Holst’s ‘Journey’s End’ and the rich assurance of Stanford’s masterly ‘Homeward Bound’.