At first sight this looks like a ragbag of songs from both established and obscure composers. It's all recorded live with introductions from Hampson, some in German, before an appreciative Salzburg audience. The many settings of Whitman give the collection its focus, but no sooner have we had one composer than the next song comes up with another. There are exceptions. Paul Bowles's Black Mountain Ballads is done complete, but the last song is not “in absolutely strict tempo” as specified. There's a powerful set of Whitman songs by Hindemith written as early as 1919. Then we discover that Stanford set Whitman in 1906: Vaughan Williams is less of a surprise.

Hampson has come up with some real curiosities. The 19th-century composer Frédéric Louis Ritter set Whitman's “Dirge for Two Veterans” as a kind of spoken melodrama. Henry Thacker Burleigh, who sang for Dvorák and made fine arrangements of spirituals, is represented by an impressively intense setting of Whitman's “Ethiopia saluting the colors” - a poem about a black woman watching the Civil War troops march past. There's a Bernstein number from Songfest (1977) that shows his easy but personal way with diatonic melody on or off Broadway. Foster's “Beautiful Dreamer” is charming with an interpolated high F sharp. It's weird to think of Hermann Reutter, who joined the Nazi party and ran the Frankfurt Staatliche Hochschule, setting the black American poet Langston Hughes. Ernest Bacon wrote some 250 songs and his four settings of Emily Dickinson ring true.

A gloomy poem by Eichendorff about invalids in hospital makes an odd ending to this collection. Not all texts are given in English and there's an essay by Hampson instead of information about the composers. Hampson's voice is a flexible and eloquent instrument and for his fans this set is essential.