A disc of Shakespeare song-settings – we all know the drill. Except, here, we really don’t. This new recital from soprano Carolyn Sampson, baritone Roderick Williams and pianist Joseph Middleton is as abundant as it is unexpected. Groups of songs, duets and cycles take us from Gurney and Ireland to Hugo Wolf and Honegger, via Hannah Kendall and Cheryl Frances-Hoad – there’s even a song by Williams himself.

Thirty-seven songs give the musicians a lot of scope, and they seize it by mostly avoiding sets or cycles (Hannah Kendall’s Rosalind is a notable exception) in favour of a selection box that favours horizontal breadth over vertical depth, contrasts and sideways connections over completism. It’s fun to follow texts between composers. John Ireland’s energetic kiss-chase of a duet ‘Full fathom five’, whose bells tinkle rather than peal, collides with the still, ocean-floor darkness and depth of Tippett’s setting for baritone.

There are no fewer than three different Greenwood Trees to lie under. Arne’s charming song suits Sampson – still the freshest, prettiest soprano voice around – down to the ground; her trilling, liquid birdsong creates a thoughtful dialogue with Gurney’s setting (sung with such expressive care for text by Williams), whose courtly formality looks back in time but is kept from pastiche by sudden gusts of 20th-century lyricism and rhapsody. Mervyn Horder’s arch, salon-style tango completes the trio.

Opening up the door to Shakespeare in translation gives us a German sequence of songs. Schubert’s familiar ‘An Silvia’ and ‘Ständchen’ (both stylishly sung by Sampson, Middleton a deft, nimble support) find new context in the raucous comedy of Bottom’s ‘Lied des transferierten Zettel’ by Wolf and Schumann’s playful ‘Schlusslied des Narren’ from Twelfth Night (Williams, bags of character to spare). Peter Cornelius’s graceful, expansive duet ‘Komm herbei, Tod’ is also a welcome discovery.

The contemporary works are well chosen. Frances-Hoad’s ‘They bore him barefaced on a bier’ is a mesmerising lament – dreamy, bleary, the piano ‘stuck’ in the repeated patterns of grief – while Kendall’s Rosalind extends the reach of the recital considerably with its experimental textures, requiring Sampson to play instruments as well as sing, to use her voice as much as percussion as melody. When Williams joins the cycle latterly it’s as a shadow-double of Sampson’s vocal lines – a timely comment on gender fluidity and conceptions of self for As You Like It’s heroine.

These are first-rate performances, but perhaps what’s most appealing about the programme is that not all the music is. We so rarely get to hear classical music’s B sides – the slight, the incidental, the sentimental – alongside the hits, especially when it comes to a much-contested field such as Shakespeare songs. Williams, Sampson and Middleton never oversell or force the issue. Setting masterpieces alongside also-rans makes for a fascinating dialogue, and one you’ll be glad to have heard.