It makes an ideal coupling linking Stanford’s breezy settings of Henry Newbolt in Songs of the Sea and Songs of the Fleet with songs by Vaughan Williams at his freshest and most open in his settings of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Songs of Travel as well as the glorious ‘Linden Lea’. Add one or two extras and you have a disc full of delights, with inspired performances from Anthony Michaels-Moore, made the more compelling by the deliciously sprung accompaniments of Michael Pollock.

The Stanford songs were at one time among his most popular works. Pollock’s accompaniments are so consistently persuasive that one hardly misses the chorus and orchestra, even in such rousing songs as ‘Drake’s Drum’, ‘Devon, O Devon’ and ‘The “Old Superb”’, all of which find Michaels-Moore at his most winning. Though the microphone catches a slight beat in his voice, it is good to have a baritone singing with such precision, bang on the note. In the gentler songs Michaels-Moore manages to shade his voice down but even he cannot persuade us that Stanford’s setting of Keats in ‘La Belle Dame sans merci’ is a match for the sea songs.

The Vaughan Williams half starts with ‘Linden Lea’ and continues with three Walt Whitman settings before the delightful Stevenson settings in the Songs of Travel; it would be hard to imagine more seductive performances of ‘The Vagabond’ and ‘The Roadside Fire’, with Pollock bringing out their freshness. The sequence of eight songs originally published has here an extra song, found among the composer’s manuscripts after his death, ‘I have trod the upward and the downward slope’. With its piano postlude, it sets the seal on a refreshing disc.