‘Virgil Thomson’s composing gift has never relied on interesting ideas, but on the uses to which dull ideas can be put,’ wrote Ned Rorem some 45 years ago. Rorem, like so many other observers, critics and casual listeners, was struggling to put his finger on the paradox of Thomson’s music: its seeming simplicity, its striking effectiveness and its aesthetic resilience in an age when other composers were celebrated for being abstract or intellectually daring.

This set, performed by four sturdy singers, two pianists and a percussionist, surveys Thomson’s output for voice, from unpublished songs written while he was a student at Harvard in the early 1920s to work written as pendants to or preparatory essays for his operas, as well as many occasional pieces throughout his career (which stretched into the 1980s). It also includes some extended works, including the ‘Oraison funèbre de Henriette-Marie-de-France’, which amounts to a solo cantata for tenor, and the Mass for Solo Voice, written in 1960, an almost-10-minute work that reveals Thomson indulging a more astringently contemporary sound.

The singers don’t have the same charisma as the singers on an earlier album from Albany, which included 25 of Thomson’s songs, but all of them are skillful and alert to the need for perfect clarity in the enunciation of Thomson’s meticulous prosody. Baritone Aaron Engebreth is the strongest, and his rendition of the Five Songs from William Blake is a highlight of the collection. Soprano Sarah Pelletier can be a bit thin in the upper reaches of the voice, and there is occasional slight hint of strain from tenor William Hite during higher forte passages. But none of these reservations diminishes the substantial pleasure of hearing these works, and hearing them in the context of Thomson’s extended career.

The early songs can be fussy – too French in a self-conscious way. Thomson, who idolised Satie and studied with Boulanger, comes into his own as a song-writer after discovery of the infantilised doggerel of Gertrude Stein, whose nonsense encouraged his natural tendency to make things limpid and lilting. A casual listener might deduce that Thomson was a pious man, given to sentimentality; but he seems drawn to sacred or quasi-sacred texts, and trivial ones full of domestic emotions, mainly because they fired his musical creativity. The further the poem resides from Thomson’s own inclinations, the more he seemed inspired by it. Thomson, and biographers, have made much of his Kansas roots; but after listening to these songs through several times and paying close attention to the texts, one senses that Kansas was, for him, merely a robust source of Rorem’s ‘dull ideas’, to which he could apply his creative and ironic energies.

But just when you think Thomson was a cynical manipulator of threadbare Americana, he comes up with something so simple and lovely that you can’t be sure of your own suspicions. This set is full of these moments, especially a generous selection of lullabies, written as gifts to friends who had recently had children. Lasting a minute or less, these lullabies seem to contain everything that is enigmatic about Thomson in concentrated form: his lyrical gift, his economy of means and his complicated relationship to simplicity and innocence. They make this collection worth the investment, even if many of the more familiar songs and song sets have been performed better elsewhere.